Sonia Seneviratne

Vice-Chair, Working Group I

IPCC

Sonia Seneviratne was elected Vice-Chair of Working Group I in July 2023. She is a Professor at the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich since 2007. She studied environmental physics and biology at ETH Zurich and the University of Lausanne. She was awarded her PhD thesis in 2003 at ETH Zurich and was a Postdoctoral scientist at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in 2003-2004. Her research addresses climate change and extreme events, land-climate interactions, and terrestrial water processes. She was a Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author on several IPCC reports, including the IPCC Special Report on Extreme events (SREX, 2012), the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C Global warming (2018), and the IPCC 6th Assessment report (2021), on which she was a coordinating lead author of the weather and climate extremes chapter.

Sonia Seneviratne belongs to the most cited scientists in her field (https://recognition.webofscience.com/awards/highly-cited/2021/). She received several awards for her research, including a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (2014), the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2013), and the Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union (2021: https://www.egu.eu/news/701/egu-announces-its-2021-awards-and-medals/).