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Professor Tim Naish (New Zealand) and Professor Cristiana Stan (USA) have been elected as the Chair and Vice-chair of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Joint Scientific Committee (JSC).  

The elections for the two positions concluded on 27 January 2025.

Prof Naish has been a member of the JSC since 2023. A renowned expert on the cryosphere, he led the WCRP Grand Challenge on Melting Ice and Global Consequences in 2019. He was also the Director of the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, for ten years, until 2017. Prof Naish is currently a Professor in Earth Sciences at the Victoria University of Wellington and seconded part-time to Antarctica New Zealand, where he leads the “Ice-Ocean-Atmosphere National Research Programme”.  

His “Melting Ice & Rising Seas Team” won the 2019 New Zealand Prime Minsters Science Prize. Tim has also received the New Zealand Antarctic Medal, the SCAR Tinker Muse Prize for Antarctic Science and Policy and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.  

Professor Stan was appointed to the WCRP JSC in 2023 and is also the co-chair of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and Teleconnections subproject of the WWRP/WCRP/S2S Prediction Project. Her research interests revolve around climate modeling with a focus on the large-scale dynamics and predictability of tropical and midlatitude variability. She also works in the development of ML/AI methods for climate data analysis.  

Prof Stan was previously a member of the U.S. CLIVAR Panel on Prediction, Predictability and Applications Interface (PPAI) and a Program Manager in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Earth and Environmental System Modeling (EESM) program under an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment. 

Their full bios can be accessed here.