Professor Myles Allen appointed Frank Jackson Foundation Professor of the Environment

Gresham College, London’s oldest Higher Education Institution, and the Frank Jackson Foundation have announced the appointment of Professor Myles Allen as Frank Jackson Foundation Professor of the Environment.

Professor Allen is Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow at St John's. Dubbed by the BBC as ‘the physicist behind net zero’, Professor Allen has been working on understanding and quantifying the drivers of climate change and extreme weather since the early 1990s. He came up to St. Johns in 1984 to read Physics and Philosophy. Those epistemology tutorials proved unexpectedly useful in arcane negotiations on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about what exactly could, and could not, be said about the origins of global warming.

Graduating in 1987, he worked for a couple of years in Kenya for the Bellerive Foundation and United Nations Environment Programme, just as the issue of climate change was climbing up the agenda. He came back to St Johns, and Oxford Physics, to do a doctorate with David Anderson, and has been working in Oxford, with sojourns to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and MIT, ever since.

As part of his post, Professor Allen will be giving a series of free public lectures - click here for more details on his appointment and the planned lectures.