Dr. Lisa Alexander

Biography

Professor Lisa Alexander completed Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Applied Mathematics at Queens University in Northern Ireland in 1995 and 1998 respectively. She worked as a research scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre in the Climate Variability Group from 1998 to 2006, during which she spent a year on secondment at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. She completed her PhD at Monash University in 2009, winning the Mollie Holman medal for her doctoral thesis. As a senior researcher at the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW, Professor Alexander’s research focuses on understanding the variability and driving mechanisms behind climate extremes. Her primary work aims to improve our understanding of observed changes in climate events using multiple research tools, including station observations and climate model outputs. Her work has significant implications, particularly in the production and assessment of global datasets concerning temperature and rainfall extremes under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Expert Team on Climate Change Detection Indices (ETCCDI) and the Expert Team on Climate Information for Decision-Making (ET-CID). Moreover, she has led regional capacity-building development workshops on behalf of the WMO in numerous developing countries, which included developing the Climpact software used to calculate and analyze climate extremes. Climpact is now widely used by National Hydrological and Meteorological Services as well as climate researchers worldwide. Additionally, Professor Alexander is a member of the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Program.

Research Interests