Our Team

Dr Kathleen Beyer is Director of the Climate Futures Research Group, and Senior Lecturer in Climate Impacts and Adaptation in the School of Geography and Spatial Sciences. She is passionate about delivering innovative, complex and integrated climate impacts and adaptation research. Kathleen’s research aims to improve our understanding of the past, present and future climate and the impacts of climate change on communities and the environment. Her broad research interests are in climate change impacts on human health, social systems, infrastructure, urban environments, energy efficiency, biosecurity, invasive species ecology, ecosystem resilience and biodiversity. Her recent work has centred around the design and development of regionally downscaled climate projections to deliver fit-for-purpose climate data, tools and products for climate-resilient planning. She led the delivered enhanced regionally downscaled climate projections (NARCliM), which are widely used by NSW government agencies and stakeholders to support climate-resilient planning and manage climate risk.

Nathan Bindoff is Professor of Physical Oceanography at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS). Professor Bindoff was the coordinating lead author for the ocean chapter in the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report and Fifth Assessment reports.

Professor Bindoff and his colleagues documented some of the first evidence for changes in the Indian, North Pacific, South Pacific and Southern Oceans and the first evidence of changes in the earth’s hydrological cycle from ocean salinity.

His most recent work is on documenting the decline in oxygen content of the oceans and dynamics of the Southern Ocean.

See Prof. Bindoff’s profile and publications here.

Sarah Boulter is Associate Professor of Climate Change and the Climate Adaptation Mission lead for the National Environmental Science Program (NESP). Sarah has spent the last decade building and supporting climate adaptation research and practice in Australia.

Sarah’s research focuses on the impacts of climate change and building capacity to adapt. She has worked with the health, biodiversity, defence and infrastructure sectors to support, develop and implement climate change adaptation strategies. Sarah was also part of the team that developed CoastAdapt, Australia’s first online climate adaptation decision-support and knowledge platform to support coastal local governments.

Dr Love has a background in atmospheric physics (PhD, University of Adelaide). His research has focussed on small scale dynamic processes in the atmosphere including waves, tides and turbulence, and their relationship to large scale circulations. These studies have been conducted primarily using ground based radar remote sensing and weather balloon observations together with a range of computational modelling techniques.

Other research interests include El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in the tropical middle atmosphere. Having joined the ACE CRC Climate Futures program in 2016, Dr Love is currently analysing the impact of climate change on weather-related fire risk factors in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

See Dr Love’s publications here.

Dr Earl has a background in applied meteorology and climatology, completing his PhD in the UK at the University of East Anglia in 2013. He then moved down under to work as a post-doc at the University of Melbourne (2013-2017) and the University of Tasmania (2018-). His research background includes observational climatological analysis of mean wind and gust speeds, providing applications for the insurance and wind energy sectors. This work involved comparing the abilities of forecast models to predict damaging winds during extra-­tropical cyclone events, while also conducting meso-scale numerical modelling of events for a better understanding of the sub­-storm scale processes involved.

Nick is passionate about applying his knowledge to help reduce humanity’s vulnerability to future climates through both research and teaching. Nick is the unit coordinator for two climate change first year units at UTas, the Introduction to the Science of Climate Change (KGA104) and Responding to Climate Change (KGA105). His post-doctoral research includes quantifying anthropogenic impacts on the environment through examining weekly cycles in urban meteorological and other parameters, remotely sensed fire analysis, examining trends in global and regional active fires, highlighting links with large-­scale climate drivers (e.g. ENSO and IOD). Nick joined the Climate Futures team in 2018. See Dr Earl’s publications here.

Nick is a very keen runner and can often be seen at the pointy end of road races around Tasmania, Australia and internationally.

Dr Mocatta is a science and environmental communication researcher and currently Senior Research Fellow in Climate Science Communication with Climate Futures. Dr Mocatta studies media discourse and public understanding of climate change, energy transitions and climate and environmental policy. As a former journalist, Gabi’s research also focuses on climate and environmental journalism and the role of media in promoting – or hindering – action on climate change. She also studies the role of communication in the context of natural hazards and disasters and is a Natural Hazards Research Australia research leader. Dr Mocatta co-wrote and teaches into KGA104 Introduction to the Science of Climate Change and KGA105 Responding to Climate Change at UTAS. She has also written Climate Change Communication, a microcredential offered globally on the FutureLearn platform. Dr Mocatta is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a collaborator in the MeCCO (Media and Climate Change Observatory) project at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a 2024/25 Fulbright Fellow, researching climate and health communication with the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in the USA.

Kathryn Allen is a palaeoclimatologist and an ARC Future Fellow. Her work has involved reconstructing past climate in Australia based on tree-rings, assessing tree-ring response to climate, and the potential of tree species to new to dendrochronology for climatological work. She pioneered the development of some types wood properties chronologies and has significantly expanded the number and quality of tree-ring chronologies in Australia. Her work has included numerous international collaborations and she has worked with industry to produce hydrological reconstructions that can be incorporated into risk assessments and management planning. Dr Allen’s Future Fellowship will compile and analyse a global database of palaeoclimate proxies to assess changes in frequency, magnitude/intensity and clustering of climate extremes over time. This will not only help better contexturalise current changes in extremes in the observed record, it will also provide critical input into risk estimation for Australian infrastructure.

Jan Jaap Meijer is an observational oceanographer deeply connected to the ocean via his passions for sailing and surfing. He is PhD in Physical Oceanography is from the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies/ University of Tasmania. He used observations and model simulations of standing meanders in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to understand how heat can be transported across the current. Standing meanders occur when the current interacts with strong topography changes and steepen/ flex with increased wind stress. This causes across frontal flow and leads to a net poleward heat transport. This has major implications for our understanding of mechanisms driving Southern Ocean warming. His background and interest are multidisciplinary and allowed him to work in different projects, including the RISC-KIT (Resilience-Increasing Strategies for Coasts – Toolkit) project, in which a set of coastal risk tools, both physical and probabilistic models, were applied to a case study in Kristianstad, Sweden. During his studies he joined sea-going courses and voyages, analysed complex data sets from seals and finished a master thesis modelling how coral cays form on platform reefs. He has a practical approach to problem solving driven by societal and environmental innovation for sustainability.

Dr Jenny Styger has a background in both research and on-ground land management. Her areas of interest include vegetation ecology and fire science and her research focuses on the best ways to implement appropriate fire regimes to promote healthy ecosystems and reduce bushfire risk. She is currently a Climate Research Fellow with the National Environmental Science Program Climate Systems Hub working on the conservation adaptation knowledge platform ConservationAdapt.

Anna specializes in strategic sustainable urban development and climate impact assessment and adaptation planning. She has worked on climate change education, assessment, and adaptation questions across sectors (industry, community, human health, and built environment) as both a researcher, educator, and private consultant. Appreciating the importance of quality stakeholder engagement processes, Anna also has significant experience working as a strategic planner and facilitator. Over her career, Anna has contributed to numerous policy development, planning decision-making processes, and technical working groups via high-level state ministerial appointments (NSW and Tasmania), federal, government, local government and NGO forums. Anna is currently working with the Climate Futures team on the Natural Hazard Atlas for Tasmania as strategic research coordinator and stakeholder engagement manager.

Ben Weeding is a physical scientist interested in using quantitative methods and data to understand and solve practical problems. Ben has worked in oceanography, estuary science, high school teaching, and climate science. He has experience in coordinating and performing fieldwork, operating and deploying scientific equipment, community engagement, and scientific modelling and programming. Ben has recently submitted his doctorate, and is currently working on a range of projects involving the bias correction and evaluation of climate models at regional scales.

Prof Jamie Kirkpatrick is Distinguished Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania. He teaches in the undergraduate program and supervises many postgraduate and honours students. His main research loves are alpine and garden ecosystems, nature conservation and the politics of environment. Jamie and his students have several projects relevant to the impacts of climate change on Tasmanian ecosystems. He has several national awards and prizes for his work developing methods for planning reserves and his contribution to forest conservation and world heritage matters.

Dr Tim Wardlaw has a doctorate in forest pathology and has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed, applied research papers in the fields of forest health and conservation management. His career has spanned 40 years, most of it spent with Forestry Tasmania and its predecessor the Forestry Commission of Tasmania. His primary responsibility was to provide the specialist expertise that underpinned operational management of the health of Tasmania’s multiple-use public forests. In that role he was involved in the development and refinement of practices for the management of all the major pests and pathogens affecting the health of Tasmania’s forests. He has been at the forefront of forest health surveillance in Australia and established formal health surveillance of Tasmania’s public multiple-use forests in 1997. This program is one of the longest running forest health surveillance programs in the country. He has shared his expertise in forest health management through capacity-building projects in many countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

While managing the conservation and biology research program at the Warra Long-Term Ecological Research site, he successful applied to get Warra selected as one of 16 “Supersites” in Australia’s national facility for monitoring its terrestrial ecosystems – TERN. He has been Principal Investigator at the Warra Supersite since its inception in 2010. Tim has had a career-long interest in the role that climate plays in forest heath, both directly and through altering the activity of pest and pathogens. The establishment of the Warra Supersite and TERN’s wider ecosystem monitoring capability has greatly strengthened the way we observe how Australia’s unique ecosystems respond to weather events. Tim has combined the knowledge and know-how gained from 40 years of detecting, diagnosing, and evaluating threats to forest health with the monitoring capability of the Warra Supersite to detect and describe a previously unknown vulnerability of the tall Eucalyptus obliqua forest at Warra to a warming climate.

Vani is a visiting PhD researcher from the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, Germany. With a background in Anthropology and rooted in her years as a conservation practitioner, her interdisciplinary study thinks about the many ways in which the Southern Ocean defies its presumed boundaries and exists in relation with the world, challenging any imagination of ocean spaces as bounded. By exploring conceptual and material social connections between Marine Protected Areas (MPA), both currently under development and implemented, to the larger global ‘centres’ across three continents, Vani pushes current ocean space governance further to consider crucial external social dynamics.

Haleh Nampak is a PhD student at the University of Tasmania with a background in physical geography and geospatial science. She has previously participated in projects aimed at solving environmental issues, while monitoring and assessing long-term feasibility. Her current research focuses on assessment of lightning climatology and environmental factors associated with wildland fire. Her research contributes to the understanding of climate change impacts on ignition efficiency across the landscape.

Karen Palmer is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania with a keen interest in sea-level rise. Her current research explores factors for extreme water levels and inundation within estuaries, the transition zone between river and sea. Karen is interested in how data from Australian environments can be used to better understand coastal vulnerability with climate change, helping communities to prepare and adapt.

Mitsuhiro Ozaki is a PhD student at the University of Tasmania and his academic background combines both Master of Information Technology and Master of Applied Science (Environmental Management and Spatial Sciences) at this university. Mitsuhiro researches bushfires in Australia. He recently published an article about prediction of bushfire models with his colleagues. Currently his research is focused on atypical terrain fires.

Nina researches municipal level climate change governance and decision-making. She studies perceptions of climate risk among local government executive and elected leaders, and the socio-institutional conditions supporting active management of climate risk. Nina is experienced in public policy and leadership. She was Principal Policy Advisor/Team Leader for the national Garnaut Climate Change Review (2007/2008) and in 2009, won a Churchill Fellowship to study local government climate change adaptation.