Joëlle Gergis

Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the University of Melbourne.

Dr Gergis has held two Australian Research Council fellowships as an internationally recognised expert in Australian and Southern Hemisphere climate variability and change.

From 2009–2012 she led the Australian Research Council Linkage funded South-Eastern Australian Recent Climate History (SEARCH) project; a landmark initiative, spanning the sciences and the humanities to reconstruct the region’s climate variability from first European settlement in 1788.

From 2009 Dr Gergis led the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) working group on Australasian climate variability of the past 2000 years (Aus2K), until the project’s completion in 2017. This involved coordinating the development of the region’s 1000 year temperature reconstruction for input into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report.

Alongside her research career, in 2012 Joëlle was awarded a Writers Victoria Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship for an Emerging Writer. In 2013 Dr Gergis was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship, and her team won the 2014 Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research – informally known as the ‘Oscars of Australian Science’.

In 2015 Joëlle was awarded the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. In February 2018, she was selected to serve as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report – a global, state-of-the art review of climate change science. In 2019, Joëlle was awarded the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) Science Outreach Award for her efforts to communicate climate change science to the public.