Julian Hunt, CB, MA, PhD, FIMA, FRS

Professor of Climate Modelling (UCL)
Honorary Professor of Mathematics

A brief curriculum vitae:

Professor Hunt's current position is Professor of Climate Modelling in the Department of Earth Sciences, and Honorary Professor of Mathematics at University College London. He is a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge. He is also a J.M. Burgers visiting professor at the Delft University of Technology, Visiting Professor at Arizona State University, Pierre Fermat Visiting Professor in Toulouse, Academic Director of the Lighthill Risk Network and Deputy Director of Lighthill Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

He was Director-General and Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office from 1992-1997. He was created a Baron in the House of Lords (with the title Lord Hunt of Chesterton) in May 2000.

Born in 1941, Professor Hunt was educated at Westminster School. He was a scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge where he obtained a First Class Honours Degree in Mechanical Sciences in 1963 and was awarded his PhD on Aspects of Magnetohydrodynamics from the same university in 1967. He was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity in 1966.

After a year as a visiting lecturer in South Africa and as a Fullbright Scholar in the USA in 1967, and spending two years as a Research Officer with the Central Electricity Research Laboratories, he returned to Cambridge in 1970 to take up a Lectureship in Applied Mathematics and Engineering. He was Reader in Fluid Mechanics from 1978 to 1990 and a Professor from 1990 to 1992.

Professor Hunt held several visiting research appointments, including Visiting Professor at Colorado State University in 1975, Visiting Scientist at North Carolina State University, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration between 1977 and 1985, and Visiting Lecturer and Research Adviser to the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1984 to 1986. In 1997 he was visiting scientist at CERFACS in Toulouse working with Meteo France, and a visiting Professor at Arizona State University working on urban mesoscale environmental problems. He did research at the Centre for Turbulence Research at Stanford, California in 1987 and 1998.

He helped found the European Research Community for Flow, Turbulence and Combustion (ERCOFTAC) in 1988 and was then Chairman of its Scientific Programme Committee from 1990 to 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989 and was awarded the L.F. Richardson Prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2001 and was appointed vice president of the National Society for Clean Air (NSCA) in 2001.

Since 1978 he has been much involved in the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), holding several positions, becoming Vice-President in 1989-1993 and President from 1993-1996. He contributed 3 chapters of the popular Penguin Book on Applications of Mathematics (Ed. C. Bondi, 1991) organised by the IMA that was translated into Japanese. He was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (1978-1999). He was a member of the Council of NERC, the National Environment Research Council, from 1994 to 1996, and for one year chaired the Atmospheric Science Research Committee. During 1998-99 he was a member of the Council of the Royal Society where he was involved in initiatives on prevention of the spread of biological weapons, government policy on data and natural disasters and sustainable development. He organised conferences on these topics and the wider policy issues. Since 1998 he was chairman of the Scientific Committee and the RISK Group, an industry-science project for the problems raised by the insurance industry. In 2002 with colleagues at University of London he organised a major conference on 'London's Environment and Future' covering most aspects from science to politics. This has led to further conferences and the publication of a book. In 2001 he became Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Protection of the Sea Ltd. (ACOPS), a non-governmental organisation for international projects on sustainable development set up by Lord Callaghan in 1952.

Professor Hunt's experimental and theoretical research in magnetohydrodynamics was related to problems in the technology of thermo-nuclear fusion, and to engineering problems of electromagnetic stirring and heating of liquid metals. His studies of, turbulent and stratified flows, and dispersion modelling have been applied to many problems in environmental fluid dynamics including building design, the siting of wind-energy generators and air pollution. He has been concerned with model assessment and the development of computer codes in these subjects, which led to his involvement as a member of the organising committee for the programme on mathematics of ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge in 1996 and as chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Programme on turbulence organised in 1999 jointly by the Isaac Newton Institute, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and major industrial and environmental organisations.

He and his colleagues at Cambridge formed a company, Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants Ltd (CERC) which developed environmental software, and in collaboration with other organisations a new air pollution dispersion model which is now the standard model for the UK Environment Agency.

While at the Met Office he was elected to the Executive Committee of the World Meteorological Organisation. He was active in negotiating new international arrangements for the exchange of data to ensure that National Meteorological Services world-wide can continue to collaborate with each other at the same time as encouraging the commercial applications of meteorology worldwide. He lectured on behalf of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) at the UN World Conference on the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in 1994 and on urban problems at Habitat II in Istanbul in 1996, and worked to improve international warnings for disasters ranging from tropical cyclones to volcanoes and to emphasise urban meteorology at WMS. He actively promoted collaboration in Europe and was elected Chairman of the Informal Conference on West European Directors for 1994 -95. One of his main interests within the Met Office was to introduce a programme of Quality Improvement. His main managerial task was to restructure the Meteorological Office as it made its transition to become a Trading Fund in 1996.

In 1965 he married Marylla Shephard who has a landscape architect practice specialising in historic gardens and landscapes. They have 2 daughters Jemima (1969) a journalist in London, and Matilda (1971) a doctor, and a son Tristram (1974) who is an academic historian and a journalist. Julian Hunt's main interests are in walking, history, France and rough gardening.