Prof Matthew England

Biography

Professor Matthew England obtained his PhD in 1992 from the University of Sydney. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France (CNRS), from 1992-1994. He was a research scientist in CSIRO’s Climate Change Research Program from 1994-1995 and was a CSIRO Flagship Fellow in 2005. He has been with the University of New South Wales since 1995, where he held an ARC Federation Fellowship from 2006-2010. He commenced an ARC Laureate Fellowship in 2011. In 2014 Prof England was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and in 2016 a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. Prof England’s research explores global-scale ocean circulation and the influence it has on regional climate, large-scale physical oceanography, ocean modelling, and climate processes, with a particular focus on the Southern Hemisphere. Using ocean and coupled climate models in combination with observations, he studies how ocean currents affect climate and climate variability on time scales of seasons to centuries. His work has made significant impact on the treatment of water-mass physics in models, on the methodologies of assessment of ocean and climate models, on our understanding of large-scale Southern Hemisphere climate modes, and on the mechanisms for regional climate variability over Australia. Prof England has served on two Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council Expert Working Groups (Antarctic and Southern Ocean Science; and Energy-Carbon-Water); the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) International Working Group for Ocean Model Development; and the ARC Earth System Science Network board. He was Co-chair of the CLIVAR Southern Ocean Region Implementation Panel 2008-2014 and is currently a member of the WCRP/CLIVAR/GEWEX Drought Interest Group. Prof England was awarded the Land & Water Australia Eureka Prize for Water Research and the Banksia Foundation Mercedes-Benz Australian Research Award in 2008. In 2007 he received the Royal Society of Victoria Research Medal. Other awards include the Sherman Eureka Prize for Environmental Research (2006); the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Priestley Medal (2005); the Australian Academy of Science Frederick White Prize (2004); a Fulbright Scholarship (1991-1992); and the University Medal, University of Sydney (1987). Prof England has authored over 220 peer-reviewed journal papers. He has been a contributing author for two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports. He was the Convening Lead Author of the 2009 Copenhagen Diagnosis. He has graduated over 25 PhDs and taught more than 3000 undergraduate students. He was an associate editor for Reviews of Geophysics 2005-2009 and an associate editor for the Journal of Climate 2008-2015.