Kate Marvel

Dr. Marvel uses climate models, observations, paleoclimate reconstructions, and basic theory to study climate change.  Her work has identified human influences on present-day cloud cover, rainfall patterns, and drought risk.  She is also interested in future climate changes, particularly climate feedback processes and the planet's sensitivity to increased carbon dioxide.  Dr. Marvel teaches in Columbia's MA in Climate and Society Program and writes the "Hot Planet" column for Scientific American.  Named one of "15 Women Who Will Save the World" by Time Magazine, she has been profiled by the New York Times and Rolling Stone, and her 2017 TED talk has been viewed over one million times.  Before becoming a climate scientist, she received a PhD in theoretical particle physics from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates scholar.  

Rebecca Huntley

Rebecca Huntley is one of Australia's most experienced social researchers and former director of The Mind and Mood Report, the longest running measure of the nation's attitudes and trends. She holds degrees in law and film studies and a PhD in gender studies, and is a mum to three young children. It was realising she is part of the problem older generation that caused her change of heart and to dedicate herself to researching our attitudes to climate change. She is a member of Al Gore's Climate Reality Corps, carries out social research for NGOs such as The Wilderness Society and WWF, and writes and presents for the ABC.

Alessandro Silvano

Uwe Radok Award 2020

Alessandro Silvano is a research fellow at the University of Southampton (UK), investigating how currents in the Southern Ocean regulate the oceanic heat transport toward the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Alessandro has recently completed a PhD at the University of Tasmania and CSIRO, where he worked on ice-ocean interaction in East Antarctica, with a focus on the Totten Glacier. 

Jaci Brown

RH Clarke Lecture

Dr Jaci Brown is the Research Director for the Climate Science Centre in CSIRO's Ocean and Atmosphere Business Unit.  Jaci's research has spanned tropical oceanography, climate projections, fisheries, high resolution ocean defence tools, and seasonal atmospheric processes in Australia.  Her previous role was as a team leader in the Agriculture and Food Business Unit. Here Jaci lead the Weather and Climate Decisions Team. This team focused on delivering actionable weather and climate knowledge to stakeholders.

Jason Wilson

Joanna Aldridge 

Dr Joanna Aldridge is IAG's Principal of Windstorm and Coastal Hazards. She is an applied mathematician and catastrophe science professional with15+ years’ experience across a range of industries including engineering, disaster management, academia, data science and re/insurance. She enjoys bridging the gap between financial services and climate science, translating between two interlinked complex systems to quantify the financial impact of risk posed by extreme events. Joanna is an honorary affiliate in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, with active research on tropical cyclone risk in the Australian context. 

Matthew England

Morton Medal

Matthew England is a Scientia Professor of Ocean & Climate Dynamics at the University of New South Wales.  He previously held an ARC Laureate Fellowship (2011-2016) and was Joint Director of the UNSW CCRC from 2006 - 2011.  In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and in 2016 a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. England is interested in the dynamics of the oceans and their role in climate variability and climate change from the tropics to Antarctica.

Acacia Pepler

Meyers Medal

Acacia Pepler is a research scientist in the Climate Research group at the Bureau of Meteorology. Acacia's research focuses on all aspects of climate extremes, from their climatology and variability in the current climate to future projections from global and regional climate models. She is interested in a wide variety of extreme events including heavy rainfall, extreme heat and cold outbreaks, severe fire weather, and even snow, as well as the systems that cause them including cyclones, high pressure systems, fronts and thunderstorms. She is also interested in the drivers of climate variability in the Australian region, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Indian Ocean Dipole, and Southern Annular Mode.

Blair Trewin

Blair Trewin is a Senior Research Scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology, specialising in the development of long-term instrumental data sets. He is Lead of the WMO Expert Team on Operational Climate Monitoring and is the extreme events lead for the WMO's annual State of the Climate Report. He is also a Lead Author for the forthcoming IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. He is an AMOS Fellow and was AMOS President from 2012-14.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick

Penny Whetton Memorial Lecture 

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a Senior Lecturer/ARC Future Fellow in the School of Science, UNSW Canberra.  She received her PhD in 2010 from the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, where she also worked from 2011-2020. Sarah was a post-doc at CSIRO supervised by Penny Whetton during 2009-2010 on the Pacific Climate Change Science Program. As a climate scientist specialising in extreme events, Sarah’s expertise focuses on heatwaves and event attribution. She leads pioneering research on how to measure heatwaves and their changes in the observational record. Sarah has analysed how heatwaves will change under various scenarios of global warming, both over Australia and globally. She is also interested in how natural climate variability drives heatwaves, as well as employing detection and attribution methods to understand how climate change influences specific extremes and their impacts. She is also passionate about science communication, and regularly comments on all things heatwaves and climate change in both the Australian and international media.