Professor Piers Forster

Profile

 

Piers is an atmospheric physicist who moved to Leeds in 2005 where he has been professor of climate physics since 2008. He researchers both the causes of climate change and the climate response of the Earth system, to understand temperature and rainfall changes and improve future projections. This is used to inform both assessments of climate impacts and mitigation strategies. He has played a significant role authoring Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, including the Fourth (2007), Fifth (2013) and Sixth (2021) assessment reports and the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C (2018).

He is founding Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures.  Graduating with a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Reading in 1994 he stayed in Reading, first as a post-doc and then as a NERC advanced research fellow from 2000-2005. During this time, he worked at both Monash University and the University of Colorado (Boulder) for 12-month periods.    He was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award for 2011-2016.  He was made a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2019. He has been a Web of Science Clarivate Analytics highly cited researcher since 2019. 

As well as his research career, Piers helped establish, the United Bank of Carbon, A UK charity that researches and protects trees and forests. He has a number of roles advising industry and government. He was appointed as a member of UK Climate Change Committee in 2019, and appointed as its interm Chair in 2023.

Responsibilities

• Director, Priestley Centre for Climate Futures

Research interests

Piers is passionate about providing the underpinning research for robust climate solutions: the mission of the Priestley Centre.

• TOZCA – Towards Zero Carbon Aviation

Qualifications

• PhD Meteorology, University of Reading
• BSc Physics, Imperial College, London

Professional memberships

• Royal Meteorological Society (Fellow)
• American Meteorological Society
• American Geophysical Union (Fellow)

Student education

I lead the teaching on postgraduate courses related to climate change; supervise both postgraduate and undergraduate research projects and contribute to undergraduate teaching related to atmospheric science and climate science. I also teach on various summer schools related to climate assessment and science 

Research groups and institutes

• Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science

Current postgraduate researchers

• Paloma Trascasa-Castro
• Weiyu Zhang
• Arundhati Kalyan