Meet the team

William Bloss is an atmospheric scientist, specialising in air pollution and atmospheric chemistry.  His research applies a combination of laboratory studies, field measurements and numerical models to understand the causes of poor air quality, and support development of effective policy measures to protect human and environmental health.  Recent work has ranged from Clean Air Science ...

Chris has been a lecturer in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Birmingham from 1994 and became Senior Lecturer from 2007.

Mike is a volcanologist and petrologist, his research focuses on the physio-chemical controls of volcanic explosivity, how to improve eruptive style forecasting and how we can best understand and minimise the impacts from large magnitude explosive eruptions.

https://sites.google.com/site/drmikecassidyvolcanoscientist/home

Dr. Liling Chang’s main research interest is to examine responses of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change, elevated atmospheric CO₂, and disturbance events (fires, droughts). Her research focuses on integrating field observations, remote sensing data, and process-based models to quantify and predict ecosystem water, energy, carbon fluxes, productivity, and demography.

Professor Lee Chapman’s research interests are at the interface of climatology and engineering investigating the impact of weather and climate on the built environment; an important research area given the ever-increasing concentration (and vulnerability) of the population and critical infrastructure in urban areas. This covers a range of topics and sub-disciplines including ...

Dr Ying Chen is an expert in climate change and air quality. His research aims to advance understanding of critical roles of aerosols and clouds in Earth climate for more reliable estimate of tipping points and remaining carbon emission budget. His research also exports interlinks between air pollution and climate change to advice policymakers for “win-win” mitigation strategies.

Julian Clark is Reader in Political Geography at the University of Birmingham. His research informs and extends debates focussed on critical geographical understandings of the state, and the governance of natural resources. In these domains Julian examines questions of how states are materialized and stabilised over space and time, including through geographies of diplomacy; and critical ...

Dr. Dini is an engineering geologist and geomorphologist with a strong interest in unravelling the physical processes underpinning landslides and the environmental factors influencing their distribution. Her work spans multiple disciplines, combining high-level remote sensing techniques such as InSAR, innovative wireless technologies, fieldwork, and spatial analyses to detect and investigate ...

Sean Elvidge is Professor of Space Environment and leads the Space Environment and Radio Engineering (SERENE) group in the School of Engineering.

Space weatherevents are one of the major risks facing society as it becomes increasingly dependent on technology. Sean's research is focused on using innovative mathematical methods to create the next generation space weather forecast models. He was ...

Emma leads exciting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of infrastructure, the built environment and green infrastructure. She currently holds an EPSRC Fellowship examining how Nature Based Solutions can deliver infrastructure resilience to extreme weather and climate change. Emma also leads and contributes to a range of projects in the fields of transport, infrastructure resilience, ...

Dr Rachel Fisher is an Assistant Professor within the School of Engineering, working at the interface between academia and industry. Their research focuses on extreme weather hazards, transport infrastructure resilience and climate change adaptation. As a recognised expert in weather hazards and climate change adaptation of transport infrastructure Dr Fisher has provided consultancy to transport ...

Professor Gauci investigates how the biosphere interacts with the atmosphere and he explores questions relating to how these interactions respond to various drivers of global change.

Dr Ruth Geen is an atmospheric dynamicist. Her research aims to increase confidence in projections of future regional climate by building simple, conceptual pictures of the large-scale circulations governing climate phenomena.

Dr Sarah Greenham is an Impact Fellow in the Urban Design and Green Infrastructure strand of the West Midlands Air Quality Improvement Programme, WM-Air. Her interdisciplinary research background primarily focuses on adapting cities and their infrastructure to the impacts of climate change. The research Sarah undertakes is motivated by the opportunity for knowledge exchange and stakeholder ...

David is a physical geographer with interdisciplinary research interests focusing on three complementary themes within hydroclimatology (interface between hydrology-climatology): (1) hydroclimatological processes within alpine, Arctic, mountain and glacierized river basins; (2) climate and river flow regimes; and (3) river energy budget and water temperature dynamics. He has cross-cutting ...

Peter is interested in understanding and predicting climate change in both the past and future. Peter specialises in using Earth System models, particularly as applied to the periods prior to industrialisation.

Peter's personal website

Dr David Jaroszweski researches the impacts of weather and potential impacts of climate change on transport systems. This research adopts a multidisciplinary approach and includes assessing the current relationships between weather and transport failure, the potential impact of climate change and the effect that concurrent socio-economic change may have on the future resilience of transport ...

Dr Joshua Larsen is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography. His research interests include:  Hydrology, ecohydrology, biogeochemistry, water quality, and palaeohydrology.

Professor Gregor Leckebusch is a leading expert in natural science research on meteorological and climatological extreme events and related impacts. His work is dedicated to natural variability and anthropogenic changes in extreme events like cyclones and storms and the relation to relevant risk assessments. Focus of his actual research is a better understanding of physical processes in the ...

Rob MacKenzie is an atmospheric scientist with a particular interest in how plants affect air composition. Watch a video of him describing one aspect of his research in 60 seconds by clicking on the play icon above. 

As a result of a £15M grant, the University of Birmingham has set up the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), of which Rob is delighted to be ...

Dr Kelvin Ng is an atmospheric scientist who focuses on meteorological and climatological extremes.

Prof. Pfrang’s work is mainly focussed on gas-phase and heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry exploring the fate of atmospheric aerosols and their impacts on air quality and climate change. He is also studying reactions of initiators of atmospheric oxidation (in particular ozone and nitrate radicals) with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), e.g. stress-induced plant emissions. Prof. Pfrang is ...

Professor Andrew Quinn is Professor of Climate Adaptation, bridging the disciplines of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science. His research focuses on the interactions between infrastructure, particularly rail and transport systems, renewable energy and extreme weather events/climate change and how these impact on the resilience of communities and services. Andrew was lead author of the ...

Xiaocheng Shang is an Associate Professor in Mathematical Optimisation and Data Science. His primary research interests lie in the optimal design of numerical methods for stochastic differential equations with a strong emphasis on applications ranging from computational mathematics, statistics, physics, to data science. He is a member of the Optimisation and Numerical Analysis Group, the Statistic ...

The atmosphere and atmospheric processes interact with the biogeochemistry of the earth system. This in turn affects human and environmental health, air quality and climate. My group addresses three areas of research central to these impacts:

• Sources and emissions of chemical substances to the atmosphere
• Physical and chemical transformation of aerosol particles and their constituents in the ...

My research is focused on halogens and radical chemistry in the troposphere, combining measurements and modelling. My main research project is about the processes that form and destroy ozone, and other pollutants, in the lower atmosphere.

Personal website: www.robsom.org

Alexandra Tzella is a lecturer in Applied Mathematics. She is a member of the Continuum Mechanics and Nonlinear Systems research groups.  Alexandra's current research uses mathematical techniques to understand how tracers (e.g. pollutants) evolve in idealised fluid and porous media flows. A key challenge is to determine how structural inhomogeneities and physical and chemical processes ...

Dr Martin Widmann is a climate scientist. His current main research area is regional climate change, in particular the development and validation of statistical downscaling methods. He also studies past climates; the main activity in this field is the development of data assimilation methods to combine climate simulations with empirical knowledge from proxy data.

Xilin Xia is an assistant professor working on computational modelling of natural hazards and their impacts. His research interests cover computational hydraulics, high-performance computing, machine learning and their applications in modelling and understanding hydraulic, hydrological, and geotechnical processes involved in natural hazards such as flooding and landslides. His research vision is ...

Dr Zhong's current research focuses on modelling the flow and thermal structures of the urban atmospheric boundary layer using a Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model and a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model. Favourable weather conditions for measurement campaigns (i.e. the deployment of the biotelemetry/bio-aerial-systems) will be identified via pre-deployment modelling, primarily using a ...