Keynote speaker: Professor Neville Nicholls

Professor Neville Nicholls spent 35 years in climate research in the Bureau of Meteorology before joining Monash University in 2006 where he is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow.

He has published over 110 papers in peer-reviewed journals. His research has included using the El Niño – Southern Oscillation to predict climate variations such as droughts and seasonal tropical cyclone activity, examining climate and weather impacts on agriculture, ecosystems, and human health (including drought impacts on suicide, heat and cold impacts, and the prediction of arbovirus epidemics), and developing and analysing data sets for monitoring climate variations and change (especially weather and climate extremes).

Neville is President of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and an editor of the new journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. He is a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation to be completed in 2011. He was a Lead Author in the IPCC Fourth Assessment (2007), and a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Second Assessment (1995). He was an editor of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate for five years — the first editor to be located outside North America.

Neville was awarded the Priestley Medal by the Australian Branch of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1987. In 2005, Neville was awarded the FitzRoy Prize by the Royal Meteorological Society for "distinguished work in applied meteorology". The same year he received the Bureau of Meteorology Individual Excellence Award.