Dame Julia Slingo served as Chief Scientist of the UK Met Office from 2009 to 2016 when she retired. At the Met Office, she led a team of more than 500 scientists working on a broad portfolio of research that underpins weather forecasting, climate predictions and climate change projections. Through her career, she has worked at the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Reading University.
Dame Julia was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015 and Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016. She is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Physics and the Royal Meteorological Society, and has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from 8 UK universities. Dame Julia has brought innovative approaches to understanding and modelling weather and climate. She has developed and used complex weather and climate models to deliver new insights into how the atmosphere and climate system works, as well as significant advances in predictive skill and in climate services. Her special interests are tropical weather and climate variability.
In her retirement, she has taken on a number of advisory roles, including Special Advisor on Climate to the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation, and she is a member of the new NERC Council under UKRI. She holds an honorary professorship at the Cabot Institute of the University of Bristol, where she chairs the Advisory Board, and at the University of Exeter where she is a lead author on the third UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3).
