Sonia Seneviratne

Sonia Seneviratne has been elected to the IPCC Bureas as IPCC Working Group I Vice-chair for the seventh cycle 2023-2030 in July 2023.  She is also Professor for Land-​Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich.

Prof. Sonia Seneviratne has published more than 200 peer-​reviewed articles and is listed among the Highy cited researchers of Web of science (Clarivate Analytics/Thomson Reuters). In her research, she investigates climate extremes (droughts, heatwaves), land-​climate processes, and human-​induced climate change, based on climate modelling and data analyses, including ground and satellite observations. Sonia Seneviratne has received several awards for her research, among others the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU, 2013), a consolidator grant of the European Research Council (ERC, 2014-​2019), and the Hans-​Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU, 2021). Prof. Sonia Seneviratne was an author on several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She was recently a lead author of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C global warming (2017-​2018) and a coordinating lead author of the 6th assessment report of the IPCC (2018-​2021).

She studied at the University of Lausanne, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich, where she completed an MSc in Environmental Physics and a PhD thesis in Climate science. After holding visiting researcher, Assistantand Associate Professor position, she became Full Professor at ETH Zurich in 2016.