BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE SPEAKERS IN THE GLOBAL
WARMING SEMINARS
1) Francis Zwiers
Francis Zwiers holds a Bachelors (Waterloo) and a Masters (Acadia) degree in
Mathematics and a Ph.D. from Dalhousie (1980) in Statistics. Following a faculty
appointment in mathematics at the University of Saskatchewan,he joined
Environment Canada in 1984, where he established an international reputation in
the field of climate variability and change. From 1997 to 2006 he led Environment
Canada's flagship climate modelling research laboratory, the Canadian Centre
for Climate Modelling and Analysis, located on the campus of the University of
Victoria. Dr. Zwiers was then appointed in 2006 as the Director of Environment
Canada's Climate Research Division. In September 2010 he joined the University
of Victoria as Director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, which includes
representation from university and government research laboratories and from
industry.
Francis Zwiers is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and received
the Patterson Distinguished Service Medal of the Meteorological Service of
Canada in 2007. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He serves (2008 to
date) as a Vice-Chair of Working Group 1 of the IPCC and was a member of the
Nobel-Prize winning IPCC team in 2007.
2) Kenneth Golden
Kenneth Golden holds a Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Physics from
Dartmouth College and a Masters (1983) and Ph.D. (1984) from NYU, both in
Mathematics. Following a faculty appointment at Princeton from 1987 to 1991,
he joined the University of Utah, where he now holds the positions of Professor
of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering. His research interests,
which have been exceptionally well-funded by NSF and the Office of Naval
Research, include the role of sea ice in the climate system and fluid, thermal and
electromagnetic transport in sea ice. He has participated in six major research
expeditions to Antarctica, the latest in Fall 2010, and has extensively studied the
sea ice in the Arctic Ocean off Barrow, Alaska, through extensive field-work from
2000 to 2007.
Dr. Golden has held numerous visiting faculty appointments at universities in
Europe, South America and Asia. He currently serves on the American
Mathematical Society Committee on Science Policy (2010-2013) and has served
on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics and the
journal Applicable Analysis. He made presentations, on behalf of the American
Mathematical Society, on the findings of his research on sea ice to hearings of the
US Congress in 2003 and 2007.
3) Kevin Trenberth
Kevin Trenberth earned his B.Sc. degree with First Class Honours at the
University of Canterbury in Christchurch in his native New Zealand in 1966,
followed by his Sc.D. in Meteorology at MIT in 1972. Following a faculty
position at the University of Illinois, he took up a position at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research in 1984 and has been head of the Climate Analysis
Section since 1987.
He was a lead author or coordinating lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007
Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports for the IPCC and was a member
of the Nobel-prize winning IPCC team in 2007. From 1999 to 2006 he served on
the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP)
and is currently chair of the WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel and the
scientific steering group of the WCRP Global Energy and Water Cycle
Experiment. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the
AAAS and the American Geophysical Union, and an Honorary Fellow of the
Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the Jule G. Charney Award of the
AMS in 2000 and the NCAR Distinguished Achievement Award in 2003. He has
been prominent in all aspects of climate variability and climate change research,
as evidenced by some 450 research publications, and is a recognised leader in the
IPCC Assessments and in the WCRP.
4) David Randall
David Randall received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aeronautical Engineering
from Ohio State University and his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the
University of California, Los Angeles in 1976. Following positions at MIT and
with NASA, he joined the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric
Science in 1988. His current research interests focus on modeling studies of
clouds and their role in the global climate system using numerical simulation.
Ongoing projects include development of improved cloud parameterization
methods, numerical experiments to determine the role of clouds in maintaining
the preset climate, and an investigation into the role of clouds in climate
dynamics. His research is supported by NASA, by the NSF and by the U.S.
Department of Energy.
Dr. Randall is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the
AAAS, and the American Geophysical Union. He is a recipient of the NASA
Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the AMS Meisinger Award
and is Chief Editor of the Journal of Climate.
5) Jasper Kirkby
Jasper Kirkby is an experimental particle physicist at CERN, Switzerland. After
completing his degrees at Oxford and London, he spent 12 years at Stanford
before joining CERN in 1984. He has built detectors and carried out experiments
at accelerators in the United States (BNL AGS, SLAC Linac, SPEAR, and PEP)
and Europe (CERN PS, LEP, PSI and RAL). He originated the idea for a new
accelerator known as the Tau-Charm Factory, which eventually led to BEPCII in
Beijing. He has originated and led several large experiments at accelerators: the
DELCO detector at SPEAR; the DELCO detector at PEP; the FAST experiment at
PSI; and the CLOUD experiment at CERN.
6) Thomas Pedersen
Following his B.Sc. in Geology at UBC, Tom Pedersen earned his Ph.D. at the
University of Edinburgh in 1974 in Marine Geochemistry. Following a faculty
appointment at UBC, he joined the University of Victoria in 2002 as Director of
the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences. In 2003 he was made Dean of the Faculty
of Science and in 2009 the inaugural Director of the Pacific Institute for Climate
Solutions (PICS). He is an internationally recognized authority on ocean
chemistry and has published extensively in the field of paleoceanography (the
history of the oceans). His current research is focused on the oceanographic
history along the western margin of North America and the relationship of
observed variability to global and regional climate change. He has longstanding
interests in climate change issues and the application of government policy to
climate-change mitigation and adaptation.
Dr. Pedersen is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2006) and a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada (2002). He has been the recipient of a Killam
Faculty Research Fellowship and the Michael J.Keen Medal of the Geological
Association of Canada.