I am currently Deputy Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K., where I have worked since 1977. My primary research interests are in the general area of late Holocene climate change, with a geographical emphasis on Europe and northern Eurasia. My specialism is dendroclimatology, the study of tree growth for the purposes of climate reconstruction. I have been responsible for a number of methodological developments within this field and produced various detailed reconstructions of individual summer temperature patterns across the Northern Hemisphere spanning some 600 years and a number of widely cited longer regional reconstructions of past climate variability (for example in Canada, Fennoscandia and Northern Siberia), widely used in the study of regional and Hemispheric mean temperature change through the last millennium.

Besides tree-ring research, my interests encompass the study of recent climate change based on instrumental records, and the theory and general application of various palaeoclimate data for describing 'natural' climate variability, its relationships with possible forcing factors and use in the study of anthropogenic climate change detection. I served for 6 years (1994-2000) on the Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) of the International Geosphere/Biosphere Past Global Changes programme (PAGES) and more recently on the SSC of the UK NERC Rapid Climate Change (RAPID) and the European Science Foundation’s HOLIVAR programmes. During the last 10 years I have coordinated several large EU-funded research projects (ADVANCE-2K, ADVANCE-10K, SOAP) exploring the empirical evidence for climate changes over the various periods in the last 10000 years and their links to possible climate forcing factors over the last 500-1000 years, as well as the realism with which these are simulated by policy-relevant coupled ocean/atmosphere models developed in the UK and Germany. I am currently a PI on two NERC projects. I am an associate editor of the journals Holocene, Boreas and Dendrochronologia. I am a Lead Author of Chapter 6 (Palaeoclimatology) of the Fourth Assessment Report of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due for publication in 2007.