Thomas Stocker

Professor of Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern andCo-Chair Working Group I, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Thomas Stocker (born in 1959) grew up in Zurich. He studied environmental physics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), graduating in 1984. He completed his dissertation under the supervision of  Kolumban Hutter at the ETHZ Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology. After a period of research at University College London, he obtained a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, which enabled him to work on the development of efficient climate models and to study abrupt climate changes at McGill University (Canada) from 1989 to 1991. He then worked as Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Columbia in New York from 1991 to 1993.

In 1993, Thomas Stocker was Professor at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern, where he heads the Climate and Environmental Physics Department. The work conducted by his team focuses on the modelling of abrupt climate change, studies on past and future changes in ocean circulation, as well as on the reconstitution of climate history using ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic.

Since 2006, he has been a member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation and, since 2008, he has been Director of the National Centre of Competence for Climate Research (NCCR Climate).

Since 1997, he has also played a leading role in the work of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC.