I am the Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. I am principally known for the time series of hemispheric and global surface temperatures, which I update on a monthly basis. I have numerous research papers over the last 25 years. I have been a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1992 and was on the Editorial Committee of the International Journal of Climatology until 1995. I am currently on the editorial board of Climatic Change. I am an elected member of Academia Europaea since 1998.

I was jointly awarded the Hugh Robert Mill Medal in 1995 by the Royal Meteorological Society for work on UK Rainfall Variability, and in 1997 the Outstanding Scientific Paper Award by the Environmental Research Laboratories / NOAA for being a coauthor on the paper "A search for Human Influences on the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere," by Ben Santer et al. in Nature, 382, 39-46 (1996). More recently I was awarded the first Hans Oesschger Medal from the European Geophysical Society (now the European Geosciences Union) in 2002 and the International Journal of Climatology prize of the Royal Meteoological Society for papers published in the last five years, also in 2002. I am recognised as one of the top 0.5% of highly-cited researchers in the Geosciences field by the ISI (the institute in the US that maintains the Web of Science, where publications and citations are monitored. I was made (2006) a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and was a awarded a Reviewer's Award by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) the same year. In 2009 I have also been made a fellow by the AGU.