Professor Myles Allen CBE FRS

Professor Myles Allen CBE FRS DPhil FInstP

Professor of Geosystem Science, University of Oxford

Biography

Myles Allen, dubbed by the BBC as ‘the physicist behind net zero’, 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.

He is currently Professor of Geosystem Science in the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment and the Department of Physics, University of Oxford and is a Fellow of Linacre College.