Speakers

R H CLARKE LECTURE

Caroline Ummenhofer received a Joint Honours B.Sc. in Marine Biology and Physical Oceanography from Bangor University, UK, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics, specialising in climate modeling, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. During 2008-2012, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, UNSW Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellow, and Visiting Fellow with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Australia. Since 2012, she holds a faculty position in the Physical Oceanography Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA. She won several awards, including the Uwe Radok Award by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Eureka Prize for Water Research and Innovation by the Australian Museum, and the James B. Macelwane Medal by the American Geophysical Union. Caroline’s research focuses on the Indian Ocean and its influence on regional climate, especially on the hydrological cycle and extreme events, such as droughts and floods, and their impact on human and natural systems.

MEYERS MEDAL 2019

Dr Adele Morrison is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the Research School of Earth Sciences at the ANU. Prior to that, Adele spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. She received her PhD from ANU in 2014. Adele is a physical oceanographer who studies large-scale ocean circulation and its relationship with Earth’s climate.  Her main focus is on understanding feedbacks in the Southern Ocean under changing climate forcing. Two topics of particular interest are how ocean circulation impacts heat and carbon uptake from the atmosphere, and how ocean currents transport heat towards Antarctica's ice shelves, driving ice melt and sea level rise.

Toshio Yamagata graduated from Geophysics Institute of School of Science, the University of Tokyo in 1971. His past professional career includes Professor of Department of Earth and Planetary Science of the University of Tokyo (UT). He served three years from 2009 to 2012 as Dean of School of Science of UT. After retiring from the university in 2012, he moved to Japan Agency of Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) as Director of Application Laboratory (APL). He is currently Project Principal Scientist of APL/JAMSTEC, and serving the President at the Japan Marine Science Foundation. He is known as a discoverer of the Indian Ocean Dipole Mode influencing the world climate and has received many honors for his research achievements in ocean and climate dynamics, including fellows of American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society (AMS), and Japan Geoscience Union.  He is also elected as honorary member of the Oceanographic Society of Japan, foreign associate member of l’Academie de Marine, and foreign academician of Nanjing University for Information Science and Technology. He has also received many awards, such as the Society Medals of both the Meteorological Society of Japan and the Oceanographic Society of Japan, the Sverdrup Gold Medal from the AMS, the Prince Albert I Gold Medal from the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans, and the Medal with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan.

Prof Andy Pitman was born in Bristol and was awarded a bachelor’s degree with honours in physical geography and a PhD in Atmospheric Science by the University of Liverpool, UK. He also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Educational Leadership from Macquarie University. Prof Pitman was Head of the Department of Physical Geography at Macquarie University from 1999 to 2003 and Deputy Dean of Division from 2000 to 2003. He initiated the Climate Risk Centre of Research Excellence there before moving to the University of New South Wales in 2007 to co-direct the newly established Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC). From 2011 to 2017 Prof Pitman was the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. Since 2017 he has been the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. This national centre involves five Universities, major Australian research agencies and many international groups.

Dr. Céline Bonfils is a climate scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Her overall research goal is to identify “fingerprints” of natural and human influences on observed changes in the hydroclimate (e.g., rainfall, droughts, atmospheric circulation). Specifically, to highlight the patterns of human influences in global climate simulations, statistically assess the presence of these patterns in observed climate records (detection), and examine the individual contribution of external drivers, e.g. atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, volcanic eruptions, or air pollution (attribution). She also develops statistical methods to capture the complex temporal behavior of climate responses, as well as multivariate techniques to better compare climate model simulations, historical climate observations and climate reconstructions of the recent past.

Bonfils holds a Ph.D. in Oceanology, Meteorology and Environment from the University of Paris VI, France. Her Ph.D. (under the supervision of Dr. Sylvie Joussaume and Dr. Nathalie de Noblet) focused on the role of continental surface on simulated mid-Holocene climate. After her Ph.D, she worked as a post-doctorate researcher with Professor Inez Fung at the University of California, Berkeley turning her attention to the link between carbon cycle and climate. She finally joined LLNL’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) in 2004 to develop and apply climate fingerprinting tools to CMIP climate simulations in collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Santer and Dr. Philip Duffy. In 2011, Dr. Bonfils received a Department Of Energy Early Career Research Program award to investigate the detection and attribution of large-scale precursors of droughts. She is also an IPCC contributing author. Through her work, Dr. Bonfils contributes and strengthens the PCMDI leadership in detection and attribution of climate change.

Ben is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, a Lecturer at Monash University, an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and a consultant in water and climate impacts. He is the instigator of the Victorian Drought Risk Inference Project (VicDRIP) which is investigating decadal climate variations, drought risk and hydrological impacts using multi-proxy palaeoclimate records, observed data and climate model simulations.

A/Prof Leanne Armand is the ANZIC (Australian and New Zealand International Ocean Discovery Program Consortium) Program Scientist and an ANU RSES researcher. She is currently a council member of the International Society of Diatom Research (2016-2019) and the representative for ANZIC on the National Marine Science Committee.  Prior to her current appointment, Leanne was a member of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University (2009-2017).

In 2007 Leanne was awarded the Australian Academy of Science's Dorothy Hill award for her excellence in palaeoceanographic research and also the Bigelow Laboratory's Rose-Provasoli award. In 2014, she received an US Antarctic Service Medal for service on the US-led Sabrina Coast Mission on the RVIB N.B. Palmer.

Dr. Angeline Pendergrass is a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, USA, where she is part of the CATALYST group in the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory. She studies how climate change will impact precipitation and the hydrologic cycle on a global scale. Her research explores fundamental questions about global precipitation variability: how much precipitation is there, what is its distribution in space and in time, and how will it change in the future? Pendergrass uses climate model simulations and analysis of observational data to study changes in the distribution of precipitation, including extremes. 

Pendergrass holds a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, as well as an M.S. from the same department. She holds a B.S. in meteorology/math and physics from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She has been based in Boulder since arriving there in early 2014 for an Advanced Studies Program postdoctoral fellowship at NCAR, and then moving to CIRES (a cooperative institute between the University of Colorado-Boulder and NOAA ESRL, also in Boulder) for a Visiting Fellowship, before arriving in her current position at NCAR.

Fraser Lott gained a Physics MSci and a Plasma Physics PhD from Imperial College London. He joined the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2009, initially working on incorporating infrared satellite data into a climate dataset, before shifting to detection and attribution of climate change. Much of this work has focussed on event attribution, where by examining the overlap between "actual world" and "natural world" probability distributions for extreme events such as droughts or heatwaves, the change in probability of that event due to human activity can be determined.

Recently, Fraser has been training early-career scientists in event attribution techniques, and has been investigating how the results can be communicated and used once event attribution becomes operationalised.

Dr Wenju Cai, CSIRO Chief Research Scientist and Office of Chief Executive Science Leader, and Director of Sothern Hemisphere Ocean Research, specialises in global climate variability and change. With over 25 years of research and leadership experience, his interest spans from dynamics of climate variability such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole, climate change detection and attribution, to impacts of individual forcing factors of increasing carbon dioxide, increasing anthropogenic aerosols, and stratospheric ozone depletion. His service to scientific communities includes contributing authorship to IPCC reports, co-Chair of World Climate Research Programme CLIVAR Pacific Panel during 2009 – 2015, a member of the CLIVAR Scientific Steering Group (2016-2018) and its co-Chair (2019-ongoing). He specialises in conceptual nonlinear frameworks for strong El Niño, La Niña, and positive IOD, uncovering their nonlinear dynamics and impact on Australian climate variability. His research has resulted in projection of increased frequency of these extremes under greenhouse warming.

Dr Zoë Sadokierski is an award-winning book designer, educator and writer. In 2010, she completed a practice-based PhD on the narrative function of graphic devices (photographs, illustrations, experimental typography) at the University of Technology Sydney, where she is now Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication. Her current research investigates narrative approaches to ecological communication: how might we communicate the social, ethical and cultural dimensions of climate change and biodiversity loss, to inspire critical dialogue and substantive change? Zoë has been invited to speak about her practice-based research at the Sydney Writers' Festival, Parsons School of Design, The Wheeler Centre, National Library of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney).