Current as of 1/06/2023

Dr John Church is an Emeritus Professor in the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales. He has published across a broad range of topics in oceanography. His area of expertise is the role of the ocean in climate, particularly anthropogenic climate change, and the oceanic storage of increased heat in the World’s oceans. He is recognised as a World leader in understanding historical and projected global and regional sea-level rise, having provided historical estimates of sea-level change since the late 19th century, robust explanations for the rise, its attribution to greenhouse gas emissions and improved projections of global and regional sea-level rise. He is the author of over 180 refereed publications, over 110 other reports and co-edited three books. He was co-convening lead author for the Chapter on Sea Level in the IPCC Third and Fifth Assessment Reports. His expertise has been recognised nationally and internationally with a number of highly significant awards: the Roger Revelle Medal by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (2006), a CSIRO Medal for Research Achievement (2006), the Eureka Prize for Scientific Research (2007), the AMOS R.H. Clarke Lecture (2008), the AMOS Morton Medal (2017), a joint winner of the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Climate Change Category Prize (2019), the AAS Jaeger Medal (2021), the Royal Society of NSW James Cook Medal (2022), the Prince Albert I medal of the International Association for Physical Sciences of the Ocean (2023). He is an Officer of the Order of Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

John Church is a leading Australian and international scientist, applying oceanographic research to pressing problems on the causes and consequences of global climate change. For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he co-authored a definitive review of sea-level change, resulting in more realism in its predicted rise. He chaired the international Scientific Steering Group for WOCE, the largest and most complex international global oceanographic experiment ever undertaken, which provides the data basis for numerical predictions of future climate change. He continues to conduct Australian oceanography in the Southern Ocean for CSIRO, ANARE and leads sea-level rise research in the ACE CRC.