Department of Environment and Geography - Environmental Science
Professor Ann Henderson-Sellers
Climate Change Researcher
Until 2007, Professor Ann Henderson-Sellers was the Director of the United Nations’ World Climate Research Programme http://wcrp.wmo.int (WCRP) based in Geneva at the headquarters of the World Meteorological Organisation. Henderson-Sellers is an international leader in climate science. She has championed the scientific need for action to mitigate and adapt to climate change for over 35 years. Professor Henderson-Sellers now holds an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship in the Department of Physical Geography of Macquarie University.
Professor Henderson-Sellers has been an Earth Systems scientist all her life spearheading the description and prediction of the influence of land-cover and landuse change on climate and human systems. She has a BSc in mathematics, undertook her PhD in collaboration with the U.K. Meteorological Office and earned a D.Sc. in climate science in 1999. She is an elected Fellow of Australia’s Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and was awarded the Centenary Medal of Australia for Service to Australian Society in Meteorology in 2003. Ann is an ISI “most highly cited” author of over 500 publications, including 14 books (http://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=ZN_YYdAAAAAJ ) and an elected Fellow of America’s Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
In the 1990s she served as a Council member of the International Council of Science’s International Geosphere- Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and as a Convening Lead Author for the Second IPCC Assessment Report. Ann chaired a national investigation into Women in Science, Engineering and Technology in the 1990s and contributed to many Academy of Sciences' National Committees She served on Australia’s Science and Technology Council, chaired the Australian National Committee for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences and has been a member of the Greenhouse Science Advisory Committee. Professor Henderson-Sellers served as the President of International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences’ International Commission for Climate between 1991 and 1995 and has led the WCRP Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment’s Project for the Intercomparison of Land-surface Parameterisation Schemes since 1992 (see http://www.pilps.mq.edu.au/). Prior to leading the WCRP Ann was the Founding Director of the Climatic Impacts Centre at Macquarie University, headed the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s Institute for Nuclear Geophysiology and was the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University.
Email: ann.henderson-sellers@mq.edu.au