Profiles of Speakers at the Opening Session

Mr. Marbouty is a member of the General Council for Environment and Sustainable Development, the audit body of the French Ministry of Environment. He is also the national coordinator for the GMES programme for earth monitoring. He has been Director-General of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, United Kingdom, from 2004 to 2011. He was Director of Operations at ECMWF from 1999 to 2004. Dominique Marbouty.

Before joining ECMWF, Mr Marbouty was Deputy Director General of Météo-France for 10 years (successively in charge of operations, strategy and the development of regional services).

Mr Marbouty is a member of several meteorological associations, namely Météo et Climat (France), the Royal Meteorological Society (UK) and the American Meteorological Society. Dominique Marbouty was elected President of the European Meteorological Society in September 2011 for a three-year term.

John Hirst was appointed Chief Executive of the Met Office in September 2007. As part of this role, he is the UK’s permanent representative to the WMO, and sits on the councils for ECMWF and EUMETSAT. John has renewed and reinvigorated the strategic direction of the Met Office, establishing collaborations on science and service with public, academic and private sector organisations worldwide including Flood Forecasting Centre, National Hazard Partnership, Environmental Science to Service Partnership and the UK Met Office Academic Partnership.

Prior to this John was CEO of Premier Farnell until 2005. Before his time at Premier Farnell, Mr Hirst spent 19 years with ICI Plc, during which he was Chief Executive of two of ICI's Global businesses, ICI Performance Chemicals and ICI Autocolor, and was Group Treasurer.

Mr Hirst holds a degree in Economics from Leeds University and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science earlier this year from the Council and Senate of Exeter University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, a Member of the Association of Corporate Treasurers and a companion of the Chartered British Institute of Management.

Joanna Haigh enjoyed science from an early age and after a first degree in Physics from Oxford, she took the MSc in Meteorology at Imperial College followed by a return to Oxford for a DPhil in Atmospheric Physics. After a post-doctoral position at Oxford she re-joined Imperial as a Lecturer in 1984, was promoted to Professor of Atmospheric Physics in 2001 and became Head of the Department of Physics in January 2009. She is also a member of the Imperial College Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

Jo has been Editor of Weather and the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment and has acted on many UK and international panels. Currently she is the UK representative to the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, Editor of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, a Member of the Institute of Physics Fellowships panel and of the Royal Society’s Climate Change Advisory Group. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP) and of the Royal Meteorological Society. She received the IOP Charles Chree Medal and Prize 2004 and the RMetS Adrian Gill Award 2010 for her work on solar influences on climate.

Sir David Bell was born in Glasgow in 1959. He studied history and philosophy at Glasgow University. He obtained his PGCE from Jordanhill College of Education and a Master of Education from Glasgow University.

He taught in primary schools in Glasgow, becoming a Headteacher in Essex. Between 1990 and 1995, he was Assistant Director of Education at Newcastle City Council, with a year as Harkness Fellow at Georgia State University, Atlanta. Sir David became an Ofsted team inspector in 1994, carrying out inspections in primary schools. By 2001 he was HM Chief Inspector of Schools in England.

In 2006 he became Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education. As the most senior education civil servant in the country, Sir David served four Secretaries of State and three Prime Ministers.

Sir David became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 2011 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading on 1 January 2012.

Dr. Gé Verver is senior researcher in the Climate Services department of KNMI. He is manager of the EUMETNET Climate Programme in which 29 European Meteorological Services collaborate to better serve the European user community with climate products and services for the benefit of environment, safety, economy and health.

He is also involved in several EU-FP7 projects related to regional reanalyses and the development of climate services. He is member of the project team developing the European Climate Assessment & Dataset in which over 40 meteorological services in Europe and the Mediterranean collaborate to provide information on changes in European weather and climate extremes, as well as the daily data needed to monitor and analyse these extremes.

In the past he participated in several national and European projects and coordinated the FP6 STAR project on tropical atmospheric research. He did his Ph.D. at Utrecht University on the interaction of atmospheric chemistry and boundary layer mixing.

Dennis Schulze is the director of MeteoGroup‘s businesses in Germany and Poland.

He is the chairman of the Board of the German Association of Private Weather Companies Verband Deutscher Wetterdienstleister, and and was involved in the consultation with the German government at the XIV Congress of the WMO in 2003. He is also involved in PRIMET, the Association of Private Meteorological Services in Europe, representing the interests of more than 35 private meteorological companies.

Dennis Schulze studied meteorology at the FU Berlin and graduated in 1998. During his time at university he worked for private weather services as a forecaster and IT expert.

Ben Dieterink has been chairman of the The Association of Hydro-Meteorological Equipment Industry until 2010.

Ben Dieterink is the Chief Executive Officer of Kipp & Zonen B.V. He graduated in electronics and business in 1975. Before joining Kipp & Zonen in 1990 he worked for 15 years in the test and measurement industry for various companies around the world, among them Philips and Gould Electronics. He became CEO in 1992, and co-owner of the company in 2003.

In 2000 Vaisala and Kipp & Zonen founded with support of WMO the association of the Hydro and Meterological Equipment Industry, HMEI. Ben Dieterink was elected as the first HMEI chairman in 2002. After completing the maximum of two terms, he is now succeeded by Brian Day of Campbell Scientific Canada.

Born in November, 1952, after the Ecole polytechnique (promotion 72) and the National School of the Meteorology, Christian Blondin begins his career in 1977 in the Direction of the National Meteorology within the Establishment of Meteorological Studies and Researches as researcher, then project manager, in Paris then in Toulouse. He joins the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading (United Kingdom) in 1985. At his return in France in 1989, he works in Paris successively in the Central Service of Meteorological Operation, then in 1992 as head of the division of Planning of the Department of the Strategy. In 1996, he is named Interregional Director for the Ile-de-France and the Centre of Météo-France. In 2001, he opts for a leave of absence to work within consulting firms in change management in CMC (Conduite et Management du Changement), then Mercer Delta France. In November, 2004, he takes the post of head of the International Affairs Department within the head office of Météo-France in Paris. In April 2009, he is nominated senior official External Relations Officer within the Secretariat of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, and in February 2011 became the head of Cabinet of the Secretary-General of the WMO and Director of the Department of External Relations. Married, father of three children, he was a listener of the National Institute of the High Studies of the Defence - regional session, and obtained a diploma of the Institute of Management Control.

Professor Alan Thorpe is the Director-General of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). He took up the position on 1 July 2011. ECMWF is an international organisation located in Reading, UK, carrying out research on numerical weather prediction and making forecasts operationally for national meteorological services across Europe.

From 2005 to 2011, Professor Alan Thorpe was the Chief Executive of the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), which is the largest funder of environmental science research in the UK universities and institutes. NERC employs around 2700 people and operates research aircraft, ships and facilities like supercomputing and Antarctic bases. Whilst with NERC, latterly Alan was the Chairman of the Executive Group of Research Councils UK bringing together the seven research councils. Prior to that Alan had a period as Director of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research and a long career as an academic at the University of Reading. His research has been on the dynamics and predictability of organised convective storms and extra tropical weather systems and latterly on climate; he has published over 110 papers in atmospheric science. He has played major roles in international research programmes such as FASTEX and THORPEX. Alan is currently also a visiting Professor at the University of Reading.

Andrew Slorance is Head of Communications within the Scottish Government's Resilience Department and is a member of the emergency planning and response management team based in Edinburgh. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and has worked in journalism and government communications for more than 25 years. Andrew is the strategic communications adviser to Scottish Ministers when the Scottish Government's Resilience Room (SGoRR) is activated during emergency situations, and he liaises with the operational and communications leads across a wide range of government and other public sector organisations in planning for emergencies, with an emphasis on warning and informing the public. Andrew joined the civil service in 1993 and in recent times was Head of Media Relations for the (then) newly created Scottish Parliament, and from 2007 to 2010 was the Official Spokesman for Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond. Given the number of severe weather episodes to have affected Scotland in the past few years, Andrew has worked very closely with the Met Office teams in Exeter and Edinburgh in developing and delivering improved public communication process before, during and after incidents. Andrew is currently heavily involved in the communications planning around safety and security issues for next year's Commonwealth games in Glasgow.