Meet our
scientists & experts

Julia is Director of the Department of Geography at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU). After studies of geography at LMU and the University of Maryland she received her PhD on the early human impact on the Earth system in 2009 at the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. She investigated food security and geoengineering as a postdoc at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, then led an Emmy-Noether research group on Earth system modeling at Max Planck in Hamburg. She moved to LMU Munich in 2018 as professor for Physical Geography and Land Use Systems. Her work focuses on human-climate-vegetation feedbacks in past and future, drivers of anthropogenic emissions, and vegetation and climate modelling. Of particular interest is the question how we can manage the land in a way that allows us to adapt to climate change while at the same time reduces emissions. Julia is chair of the German research program CDRterra, which aims at a comprehensive assessment of terrestrial CDR to guide the development of sustainable pathways towards climate neutrality, and advices the German government on nature-based solutions. She contributes to the IPCC Assessment Reports and UNEP Emissions Gap Reports and coordinates the land-use emissions estimates in GCP's Global Carbon Budget.

Peter Cox is Professor of Climate System Dynamics in Mathematics and the Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. He has previously worked at the Met Office-Hadley Centre (1990-2004) and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (2004-2006). He is an international leader in the understanding of interactions between the land biosphere and climate change. He led the team that carried-out the first climate simulations to include the carbon cycle and vegetation as interactive components (Cox et al., 2000), which highlighted the possibility of Amazon Forest dieback under climate change (Cox et al., 2004). Professor Cox is a lead author on the 4th, 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the UK Government’s Defra Scientific Advisory Council. He has been named as a highly-cited author by Thomson-Reuters for every year from 2014 onwards and won an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017. Professor Cox has made outstanding contributions to research within the field of climate change. His work was central to the early development of the Met Office Hadley Centre, where he held several positions including Head of Climate, Chemistry and Ecosystems, and from 2006 he has been driving the development of world-leading climate research at the University of Exeter.

Anna von der Heydt is a professor for paleoclimate dynamics at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Trained as a physicist at the University of Marburg (Germany), she received her PhD degree at the University of Twente (Netherlands) working on fluid dynamics. Her work focusses on (palaeo-) climate phenomena and transition behaviour in climate using a hierarchy of climate models and stochastic dynamical systems approaches. She works on quantifying the state-dependent climate response to forcing. In 2021 she received a personal grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to investigate interaction tipping elements in the climate system. She is active within the Earth System Feedback Research Centre (EMBRACER) funded by NWO, the Centre for Complex Systems Studies in Utrecht (CCSS) and is leading the Horizon Europe funded project Past to Future on paleoclimate (P2F).