Chris is a recently completed Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Climate Change and Earth Science at the University of New South Wales. Working across the globe, Chris is extending historic records back to 130,000 years ago to improve projections of future climatic and environmental change. Chris is Director of Earth and Sustainability Science Research Centre (ESSRC) and is Director of the Chronos 14Carbon-Cycle Facility. He is also UNSW Node Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) and is a member of the International radiocarbon Calibration group (IntCal). To help do something positive about climate change, he set up a carbon refining company called CarbonScape which has developed technology to fix carbon from the atmosphere and make a host of green bi-products including sustainablly-produced graphite for batteries. As part of this work, Chris set up and co-ordinates the international Earth's Past Future Project. Chris co-ordinates and teaches on GEOS3761 ‘Environmental Change’.
Chris has over 30,000 citations listed in Google Scholar with an h-index of 58 (52 reported in Scopus) and a Scopus Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 8.7 – that is, outputs have been cited over 8.7 times the world average for similar publications. These statistics have been generated from over 200 scientific papers (10 papers in Nature and Science, 1 in Science Advances, 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 in Nature Geoscience, 5 in Nature Communications), 1 textbook and 5 books. Described by the UK Saturday Times as the ‘new David Livingstone’, Chris’ team communicate their findings in the field as Intrepid Science, reporting discoveries when they happen, where they happen. Chris has received numerous awards, including the Australian Academy of Sciences Frederick Stone Award (2014), the Geological Society of London’s Bigsby Medal (2009), the Philip Levehulme Prize (2008), and the inaugural Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal (2007) from the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA).
Chris is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Meteorological Society, the Geological Society of London, the Royal Geographical Society and the Higher Education Academy.