Program
- Program
- Plenary Speakers
He was Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Cycle, elected since October 2015. His research encompasses the economics of climate change, energy and sustainable development. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Korean Academy of Environmental Sciences, and chair of the Asian Development Bank President’s Advisory Board on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. Lee was the founding president of the Korea Energy Economics Institute — a government agency for national energy policy development. He was Distinguished Research Fellow at the Korea Environment Institute, senior adviser to the Minister of Energy and Resources and the Minister of Environment, senior fellow at the Korea Development Institute and economist at Exxon Company USA. He served as the president of the International Association for Energy Economics, president of the Korea Resources Economics Association, member of the International Advisory Board of the Battelle-Pacific Northwest National Lab, USA, the Board of Directors of Hyundai Corporation and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan, and council member of the Global Green Growth Institute. He was Co-Chair of the IPCC Working Group III (the socio-economic dimensions of climate change) for the Second Assessment which provided a scientific basis for the UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol. He served as Vice-Chair of IPCC 2008-2015, and lead author and review editor for the various IPCC assessments. He has served on many national and international committees addressing climate change and energy. He received his B.A. from Seoul National University and Ph.D. in economics from Rutgers University, USA. He was named to the 2019 TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World. He received the Outstanding Contributions to the Profession Award 2020 from the International Association for Energy Economics. He was named to the 2021 Bloomberg 50 List. He received the 2024 Energy Economist of the Year Award from Energy Intelligence.
Dr. Zhu has published more than 350 refereed journal papers, 6 books, 5 book chapters, covering Megacity and Regional Air Pollution, Fundamental Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Biogeochemistry, Health Effects of Environmental Pollution in Science, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Proceedings of National Academy of Science, Nature Geoscience, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Environmental Science & Technology. Several of his publications received wide media attention in New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Chemical & Engineering News, Guardian, Reuters, BBC News, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News.
His research has resulted in over 15320 literature citations and an h-index of 64 (from Web of Science). He is ranked as one of the most cited Chinese researchers in Environmental Sciences by Elsevier, and highly cited researcher in cross field by Clarivate and Web of Science.
Ayako Abe-Ouchi received her PhD from ETH Zurich in 1993. The thesis research was on modelling the ice sheet response to climate change, a topic that has been at the centre of her research interests ever since.
Abe-Ouchi has made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of climate change on orbital timescales through a body of modelling work that has set a new standard for the field. She has demonstrated that the 100,000-year periodicity of the most recent glacial cycles can be understood through internal feedbacks between climate, ice-sheet volume, and the isostatic response, including the rapid terminations of each cycle. Her work provides a compelling solution to the long-standing “100-kyr problem” in palaeoclimate research: the observation that the ice-age cycles have a dominant 100,000-year periodicity, despite weak orbital forcing at that frequency.
More recently, Abe-Ouchi’s work has been focusing on simulating Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations and how their occurrence and timing characteristics depend on the background climate. This work is opening new avenues in investigating the interaction between millennial-scale and orbital-scale climate change.
Abe-Ouchi is also widely recognized as a community leader who has played key roles in the IPCC, in the ice-coring community, and in various model inter-comparison projects. She was a contributing author on the Third Assessment Report; lead author on the Fifth Assessment Report; and review editor for the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. Abe-Ouchi has also been instrumental in the success of multiple model intercomparison studies. She is a member of the steering committee for the Paleoclimate Model Intercomparison Project (PMIP) and the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP) and has actively contributed to the experimental design of both.
Owing to her fundamental scientific contributions, leadership on model intercomparison, and service to the IPCC, Ayako Abe-Ouchi is a scientist representing the very best of our community. She is an exceptionally worthy recipient of the 2021 Milankovic Medal.
Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll is a Climate Scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. He did his Ph.D. in Ocean and Atmospheric Dynamics from Hokkaido University, Japan.
Koll has made breakthrough contributions to the research, monitoring, and modeling of climate and extreme weather events over the Indo-Pacific region. His work has advanced the scientific understanding of monsoon floods and droughts, terrestrial and marine heatwaves, and cyclones—facilitating the food, water, and economic security of the region.
Koll is a Lead Author of the IPCC Reports and the former Chair of the Indian Ocean Region Panel. He actively collaborates with citizen science networks, local governments, and media to bring science to society.
Koll received the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (National Science Award), the highest recognition in the field of science, technology and innovation in India, from the President of India in 2024. He was conferred a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and was awarded the AGU Devendra Lal Medal for outstanding research in Earth and Space Sciences in 2022. He is among the top 2% scientists ranked by Stanford University. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Kavli Fellowship in 2015 and the NRC Senior Research Fellowship in 2018. The Indian Meteorological Society felicitated him with the Young Scientist Award in 2016 for his research on the changes in the Monsoon.