Profiles of speakers at the Plenary Sessions

Bob Riddaway retired from the Met Office in the UK in 2005, though he continued working part-time at ECMWF for another 10 years. After gaining a BSc in Physics and a PhD in Meteorology from Edinburgh University he joined the Met Office to do research. He soon found that training and operational meteorology were more to his liking, so his career included being Head of Training and Joint Head of Forecasting. Whilst at the Met Office he became involved in the education and training activities of the WMO, and this still continues.

For nearly 50 years Bob Riddaway has been involved in the activities of the Royal Meteorological Society. These included running various educational activities, helping to establish professional meteorological qualifications, and being the founding editor of Meteorological Applications. For 8 years he was the General Secretary and is currently a member of the Accreditation Board. He was a member of the EMS Council and also Vice President between 2008 and 2015.

Sven-Erik Gryning graduated from the Technical University of Denmark in 1972 and came to Risø National Laboratory (since 2007 merged with the Technical University of Denmark) in 1974 after a year in the military and a year in a consulting firm where he worked with air pollution. At Risø he started partly dealing with the spread of pollution from high chimneys and partly with air measurements of long-distance transport of sulfur dioxide. In 1977 he came to Risø's Physics Department in the meteorology section. Here he continued the work of spreading substances into the atmosphere and with the meteorology needed to understand this spread. The place of employment gradually changed character and name and is now the Department of Wind Energy at DTU. His focus has consistently been on meteorology, especially in the lower parts of the atmosphere, where most of the human activity takes place.

Sven-Erik has at times worked at laboratories and universities abroad, Pennsylvania State University in the United States, the EU Joint Research Center, Ispra, Italy and the Defense Research Center, Umeå, Sweden. The topic of the studies has changed with the years from aspects of air pollution, basic meteorological issues to wind energy. In parallel, Sven-Erik Gryning has been an active participant in national and international scientific networks, committees and as reviewer and editor of international scientific journals, reports and books. He is since 2017 President of the Danish Meteorological Society.

Marianne Thyrring is born in 1959 and graduated from Aarhus University in 1984 as Master of Science in Political Science. Marianne has throughout her career worked in several government positions in Denmark and abroad. Marianne is formerly Permanent Secretary for the Danish Ministry of Environment before she was appointed the Director General of the Danish Meteorological Institute in 2013. Marianne is a board member of the executive committees of the Danish Pension Fund for Lawyers and Economists (JØP) and the Danish Association of Lawyers and Economists’ Publishing House (DJØF-Publishing). Marianne was in 2017 appointed by the Danish Government as member of the Commission on Public Leadership and Management. Marianne is Chairman of Employer Panel for Physics, Chemistry and Nanoscience at the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen and is presently Co-Chair of the International Ice Charting Working Group, IICWG.

Peter Hauge Madsen is head of the department, DTU Wind Energy, at the Technical University of Denmark. PHM has been involved with energy research and research management for more than 30 years, primarily in the field of wind energy. In addition to working at Risoe National Laboratory until 2005, he has had a position as research manager at Siemens Wind Power and as head of the project certification section at Det Norske Veritas. Since 2009, PHM has been back at DTU in charge of wind energy, since 1st of January 2012, head of department for DTU Wind Energy. This department includes eleven sections, covering fields from meteorology to materials science. The activities are organized into three multi-disciplinary research and innovation programs: siting and integration, wind turbine technology and offshore wind energy. Furthermore the department operates an educational program and a program for research-based consultancy and testing. The educational program as well as activities on continued education attracts many international students, and e-learning is a priority. In total 240 employees, including approximately 40 PhDs are working within research, education, innovation and research-based consultancy. PHM is active in international standardization and cooperation and chairs the Danish national committee for wind turbine standardization and the European Energy research Alliance’s joint program for wind energy. In addition, PHM chairs the Accident Investigation Board for offshore installations and is member of the Board of the Danish Wind Industry Association and of various steering committees for example ETIPWind and UNI-SET. He holds a MSc and a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark. He is member of the UNI-SET Steering Committee.

Johanna Ekman leads the Finnish Meteorological Institute’s activities related to Finland’s chairmanship in the Arctic Council (2017–2019) and its priority, “meteorological cooperation”.
Johanna has a doctoral degree in marine biology and is also a docent of hydrobiology. In her doctoral thesis from 1997 at the University of Helsinki, Finland, she studied the biology of sea ice in the Arctic, Antarctic and the Baltic Sea. Later, she made a career with an unexceptionally wide range of expertise; she has held positions as a lecturer and later an acting professor of hydrobiology at the University of Helsinki, Head of the Biosciences and Environment Unit at the Academy of Finland, Head of Environmental Affairs at the Central Union of Finnish Farmers and Forest Owners MTK, and Head of the Marine Research Unit at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). In 2014–2016 she worked as ministerial adviser at the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications. She was also the Chair of the Board for the “ArcTrade” Growth Programme in Business Finland in 2016–2018. In the core of her expertise are matters related to the Arctic “sensu lato”: policy, climate, sustainable development, oceans, meteorology and business in the Arctic, and promoting arctic know-how.

Prof Thomas Jung in an expert in climate analysis, modelling and prediction from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. He received his PhD 2000 in atmospheric physics from the University of Kiel and the Institute for Marine Research (now GEOMAR). He then went on to work for 10 years in the Research Department of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK. Prof Jung is head of the Climate Dynamics section at AWI and full professor for physics of the climate system at the University of Bremen. He is also the spokesperson of AWI’s research programme. Furthermore, he acts as the chair of various committees, including the Polar Prediction Project of the World Meteorological Organisation. Prof Jung coordinates major research projects such as APPLICATE, which is funded through the Horizon2020 programme, and Advanced Earth System Modelling Capacity, which is funded through the Helmholtz Association.

Professor Schlünzen studied meteorology and oceanography, finishing with her PhD in 1988 by developing and applying a non-hydrostatic atmospheric model. After her post-doctoral studies with a focus on model development and evaluation methodologies, she became Professor of Meteorology at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg in 2003. She heads the mesoscale and microscale modelling group and coordinates research on “Urban regions in global change” at the Centre for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN).

Among other things, she coordinates the development of air quality directives in the field of environmental meteorology of the Commission for Air Pollution Control, is a member of the review board on Atmospheric Science, Oceanography and Climate Research of the German Research Foundation, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for WMO-GURME.

Her research focus is on small-scale atmospheric processes triggered by local changes, including those caused by humans or that are influenced by climate change. This includes in particular the influences of climate change and urban structures on the urban climate. Numerical models developed, tested, and made available to science and practice, are an important tool for her scientific research.

Dr Bruyninckx studied undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science specialising in international relations at Antwerp University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He also completed an additional programme in development studies at the University Catholique de Louvain. He completed a PhD degree in 1996 at Colorado State University on the topic of international environmental politics, subsequently teaching at several other universities in the United States and Europe, including Colorado State University, Canisius College and Wageningen University. From 2010 until his appointment at the EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute in Leuven, Belgium, a policy-oriented research institute associated with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he was also head of the Political Science department from 2007 to 2010. Dr Bruyninckx has also been a senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and promoter-coordinator of the Flemish Policy Research Centre on Transitions for Sustainable Development (TRADO).

Over the last 20 years, he has conducted and managed policy-oriented research in the areas of environmental politics, climate change, and sustainable development. He was responsible for research in the domains of policy evaluation, monitoring and reporting, methodology development, environmental policy integration, and more recently also on long-term transition policies. His experience pertains to the level of the regions (Flanders in a comparative European perspective), the EU Member States, the EU level, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and processes of global environmental governance (climate change in particular). His academic expertise lies primarily in the field of European and international environmental policy, studying the effects of globalisation on the global governance of environmental issues and sustainable development. From this perspective he has also studied global production and consumption systems, as well as issues relating to distribution and justice. He has taught courses on the topics of global environmental politics and global environmental governance in relation to the European Union (EU), publishing extensively on EU environmental policies and its role as an actor in global environmental governance.

Dr Bruyninckx was involved in numerous policy processes as an advisory board member, involved in steering groups of government agencies, and as academic policy advisor to governmental agencies and other key actors. In addition, he has worked intensely with civil society and business actors, in support of public-private initiatives or private regulatory approaches to environmental, climate change and sustainability issues. Furthermore, he was president of the board of Bond Beter Leefmilieu (The Association for a Better Environment).