Personal interests and CV


I am 59. I was born in Welwyn Garden City, 20 miles north of London, and went to primary and secondary school there, except that for three years (ages 4 to 7) of my childhood we lived on Manhattan (upper east side). Before beginning university I spent five months in Kenya on voluntary service. I took my first degree in 1986 at Oxford in physics, and my PhD in 1990 in particle physics at Birmingham concerned with the UA1 experiment at CERN in Geneva, where I worked for 15 months.

My first job was for a year at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia at Norwich, with Phil Jones and Tom Wigley. I joined the climate change group, led by John Mitchell, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research soon after the Centre opened in 1990. I was joint coordinating lead author of the sea level chapter of the Third Assessment Report (2001) of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While continuing to work part-time in the Met Office Hadley Centre as a Science Fellow, I took a new post in April 2003 as a senior scientist in the climate programme of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, at the Department of Meteorology of the University of Reading, with the title of professor from October 2006. I served as a lead author of the projections and ocean observations chapters and the technical summary of the IPCC WG1 Fourth Assessment Report (2007), and of the sea-level chapter and the technical summary of the IPCC WG1 Fifth Assessment Report (2013).

The European Research Council funded my research on sea-level change due to ocean density and circulation change with an Advanced Grant during 2010-2016 (project "Seachange"), and on transient climate change in the coupled atmosphere--ocean system with an Advanced Grant that began in October 2018 (project "Couplet"). I received the FitzRoy prize of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2016, the Frontiers of Knowledge Climate Change Award from the BBVA Foundation in 2019 (jointly with my long-standing colleagues John Church and Anny Cazenave), the CERN Directorate alumni award in 2021, and the Syukuro Manabe Climate Research Award from the American Meteorological Society in 2023. In case it helps others who feel that their work is going unrecognised, I would like to note that the Fitzroy Prize was the first award that I received for my personal contribution to research, 27 years after I began working in climate science. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2017.

For much of my adult life I have suffered from recurrent depression, which is related to imposter syndrome as regards my work. Because others probably have similar difficulties to mine and it's good to know you're not alone, I have written some reflections on this. A consulting psychologist and previous counsellors helped me to understand myself better, and for the last several years I have maintained a more positive state of mind with the aid of an antidepressant medication (sertraline). This does not prevent despondency, but it seems to make me more resilient and better able to climb out of the pit of despair if I fall into it. Friends and family are very important companions for me in the journey of life because I am both aromantic and asexual.

Apart from climate research, I like thinking and talking about many other subjects. I'm interested in languages but I cannot speak any fluently except English, and adequate French for functional conversations. I enjoy classical music; Rachmaninov and Bach are my favourite composers. I play the piano a bit. I read all sorts of books. I have spent considerable effort in improving the energy-efficiency of my own house, which is a building of Victorian age, and have so far reduced my household energy import by about 85% (see graph), mainly by improved thermal insulation, domestic renewable generation of heat and electricity, and replacement of the gas boiler with an air-source heat pump. This last step eliminates CO₂ emissions provided the imported electricity is fossil-fuel-free.

I am keen on hill-walking and Alpine mountaineering. In my 30s I started rock-climbing in order to be able to get up some more of the 4000 m peaks in the Alps. I'm no rock star (I am uncomfortable leading harder routes than Severe outdoors, and 6a+ indoors), but you don't need great technical ability on many of the normal routes in the Alps. I find Alpine ascents tremendously exciting and stunningly beautiful. On one particularly exciting day (15 July 2003), a friend and I climbed the Matterhorn, and were evacuated while on the way down by helicopter owing to a rockfall that had blocked the bottom part of the route. (Subsequently the large number of Alpine rockfalls during summer 2003 were explained as being caused by thawing of permafrost due to the exceptionally hot weather.) Of the 50 Alpine summits over 4000 m (according to Martin Moran's list), I have so far climbed 45, in recent years guided by Neil Johnson and Tim Neill on the harder ones.

Aiguille and Arête de Rochefort


Jonathan Gregory