Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick | |
|---|---|
 Perkins-Kirkpatrick in December 2020 | |
| Born | 1983[ citation needed ] Sydney, Australia |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Occupation | Scientist |
| Known for | Heatwave research |
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is an Australian climate scientist and expert in heatwave research. She was awarded a NSW Young Tall Poppy in 2013 and received the Dorothy Hill award in 2021. [1] She has extensive science communication experience.
Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a climate scientist working on heatwave events, including how heatwaves are defined, trends of heatwaves, projected future changes, physical drivers of heatwaves, and anthropogenic influences driving observed events. She was awarded an ARC DECRA, and then subsequently, awarded an ARC Future Fellowship at the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW. She was at the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre from the years 20122 to 2022, and then moved to UNSW Canberra. [2] She was awarded the Young Tall Poppy prize for communication in science skills in 2013. [3] She has spent much of her career providing commentary on climate change and heatwaves.
"The less we warm the planet, the less bad heatwave changes will be. They’re not looking good." [4]
Perkins-Kirkpatrick has completed two postdoctoral fellowships, one at the CSIRO division of Marine and Atmospheric Research, and a second at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. She has held and undertaken workshops Internationally, in both Australia and in the Pacific Islands, where she was communicating the science of climate change amongst community groups which had little experience or literacy in climate science. Perkins-Kirkpatrick also held a role on the World Meteorological Organisation's Expert Team – in the sector on Climate Risk and Sector specific Climate Indices. In 2011, she also took part in the event where scientists communicate with politicians, called Science meets Parliament.
Perkins-Kirkpatrick specialises in researching and science communication of climate change, climate projections, extreme events, as well as, heatwaves, and extreme heat events. She has recently worked in marine heatwaves, such as the marine heatwave along the coast of South-East Australia in 2022. [5]
Perkins-Kirkpatrick is also a member of the core group of the Resilient Futures Collective, part of UNSW. The Resilient Futures Collective focusses on research on droughts, floods, bushfires, and cyclones, which cause damage and disruption to rural and regional communities. The Collective examines how risk reduction through good governance, planning, and vulnerability analyses can minimise the impacts of natural disasters. [6]
Perkins-Kirkpatrick has written for and been quoted in the International and Australian media many times, [8] describing the impacts and science behind climate change and heatwaves, and more recently, marine heatwaves. [9] Her research has been described, and she has participated in media interviews, in Cosmos, [4] Carbon Brief, [9] as well as provided commentary on the BBC, [10] [11] Triple J's Hack, Radio National, [12] the Sydney Morning Herald, [13] [14] the 7:30 Report, Science. [8] She has participated in radio interviews, print media, and written regular blog posts on heatwaves and the impacts of climate change.
The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive universities.
Matthew England is a physical oceanographer and climate scientist. He is currently Scientia Professor of Ocean & Climate Dynamics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
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Michael James Salinger is a New Zealand climate change researcher and teacher who has worked for a range of universities in his home country and around the world. He was a senior climate scientist for a Crown Research Institute, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), and President of the Commission for Agricultural Meteorology of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He has received several awards and other honours for his work with climate change and is involved in researching and monitoring past and current climate trends. Within his area of specialist scientific knowledge, Salinger has co-authored and edited a range of reports, articles and books. He was involved in an employment dispute and elements of his theory and practice were at the centre of a case against NIWA.
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Katharina Gaus was a German-Australian immunologist and molecular microscopist. She was an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and founding head of the Cellular Membrane Biology Lab, part of the Centre for Vascular Research at the University of New South Wales. Gaus used new super-resolution fluorescence microscopes to examine the plasma membrane within intact living cells, and study cell signalling at the level of single molecules to better understand how cells "make decisions". A key discovery of Gaus and her team was how T-cells decide to switch on the body's immune system to attack diseases. Her work is of importance to the development of drugs that can work with T-cells in support of the immune system.
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Kaarin Anstey is an Australian Laureate Fellow and one of Australia's top dementia scientists. She is Co-Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where she is Scientia Professor of Psychology. Kaarin Anstey is an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She is a Director of the NHMRC Dementia Centre for Research Collaboration, Senior Principal Research Scientist at NeuRA and leads the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Cognitive Health and the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute.
A marine heatwave (MHW) is a period of abnormally high temperatures relative to the average seasonal temperature in a particular region of a sea or ocean. Marine heatwaves are caused by a variety of factors, including shorter term weather phenomena such as fronts, intraseasonal, annual, or decadal modes like El Niño events, and longer term changes like climate change. Marine heatwaves can lead to severe biodiversity changes such as sea star wasting disease, harmful algal blooms, and mass mortality of benthic communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) finds that it is "virtually certain" that the global ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat in our climate systems, the rate of ocean warming has doubled, and MHW events have doubled in frequency since 1982. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report supports these findings, while also detailing new evidence that MHWs have become longer and more intense.
Moninya Roughan is a professor of Oceanography at the University of New South Wales Australia,. Roughan is the head of the Coastal and Regional Oceanography Lab and is an authority on the oceanography of the East Australian Current. She has led major projects for industry, government, the Australian Research Council and the New Zealand Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. She has held leadership roles in Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System since 2007.
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Tracy Ainsworth is a marine biologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, working on coral reefs, and the biology of the Great Barrier Reef. Her research covers the biology of stresses, cells, disease, immunity and sympbios. She was awarded the Dorothy Hill Medal for science, from the Australian Academy of Science, for research on coral reef, stresses and impacts of temperature on coral health.
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Andréa Sardinha Taschetto or A. S. Taschetto; Andréa Taschetto is a climate change scientist at the University of New South Wales, and winner of the Dorothy Hill award. She was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2016. Her research has contributed to improved understanding of the role of oceans, on climate variability at regional scales, and from seasonal to mulit-decade timescales. This research also has assisted with future climate projections.
Wenjie Zhang is a Professor and Head of the Data and Knowledge Research Group within the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales. Her most notable breakthrough is in the area of optimization strategies to process computationally complex large graphs. Her work is among the first to identify that graph complexity relies only on the small size of the query input and output rather than the size of the whole data graph, which could be a web scale, such as in social media networks. Her recent research focuses on algorithms, indexes, and systems in large scale graphs and their applications especially in social network analysis.
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