An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Our principal fellows

Adam Scaife (Climate Science) is an internationally recognised expert in the dynamics of weather and climate and leads a team that has made impressive improvements to the systems that produce our monthly to decadal forecasts. As Principal Fellow, Adam continues to improve our long-range forecasts, works with others in the Met Office to investigate greater exploitation of ensembles and also leads our Newton Fund CSSP China project.

  • Cath Senior 

Cath Senior is an internationally recognised expert in modelling of climate change and has pushed the frontiers of high resolution climate modelling. As Principal Fellow, Cath will continue to lead the Path-to-High-Resolution R&I theme working across Met Office Science to provide evidence for the added value of km-scale resolution climate modelling. 

  • Jason Lowe

Jason Lowe (whose role is 50% in Climate Science and 50% in Applied Science) is an internationally recognised expert across a broad range of climate science and has played a leading role in the development of climate services in the Met Office.  As a Principal Fellow, Jason will work across Climate Science and Applied Science to ensure that we best utilise our climate science and translate this into actionable climate services.

  • Jeremy Tandy

Jeremy Tandy (Technology & Information Services) plays a leading role in the international National Hydro Meteorolocial Service community by defining progressive approaches to technology and standards.  As Principal Fellow, Jeremy plays a leading role in ensuring that the Met Office continue to be recognised as a world leader in adopting new technology approaches.  He will also expand our work in this area with the private sector so that they recognise the specific challenges, issues and opportunities of what the Met Office do.

  • Jon Taylor 

Jon Taylor is an internationally recognised expert in atmospheric observations having worked in this area for most of his career within the Science and Services directorates. As Principal Fellow, Jon will drive our vision for the future of observations. This will determine our requirements for conventional observations, and also opportunities with the private sector and partners for innovative and opportunistic observations. 

  • Kirstine Dale

Kirstine Dale is the Met Office's Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and Principal Fellow for Data Science. As CAIO she is charged with embedding AI in the Office’s core business: initially the focus is the use of AI in weather forecasting through leadership of the ‘AI for numerical weather prediction’ (AI4NWP) programme. As Principal Fellow, Kirstine plays a leading role in shaping the future of Data Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) in the Met Office. 

Matthew Hort  is an internationally recognised expert in dispersion modelling and in particular in its development, application and communication for emergency response. Matt has made enormous contributions to UK capabilities for and in response to numerous disasters. As Principal Fellow, Matt will lead our efforts in further developing and exploiting our dispersion capabilities and the critical role they play in hazard to decision making. 

Nigel Wood (Foundation Science) is an internationally recognised expert in the mathematics at the core of our weather and climate models. As Principal Fellow, Nigel leads our efforts in re-engineering our weather and climate simulation capabilities, ensuring the scientific algorithms and software will perform on future supercomputers.  He is also our science lead on the ExCALIBUR project.

  • Paul Davies

Paul Davies (Forecasting & Service Delivery) is recognised as a world leading expert in operational meteorology and as the Met Office Chief Meteorologist he plays a crucial role in our operations.  As a Principal Fellow he continues in his role, being a champion for operational meteorology, helping to drive our future vision for meteorological servies and ensuring we make the use of the best science and technology from within the Met Office and from partner organisations.

  • Paul Selwood

Paul Selwood (Weather Science) is an internationally recognised expert in software engineering and has made enormous contribution to the Met Office by making our weather and climate software run more efficiently on our HPC.  As Principal Fellow, Paul is making a pivotal contribution to our next HPC procurement through his deep understanding of the scientific and technical requirements of our modelling systems.

  • Richard Lawrence 

    Richard Lawrence  is recognised as a leading expert in highly-scaled technology architecture and led the specification and design of the progressive approach to supercomputing at the Met Office. As Principal Fellow, Richard will work with technology vendors, the UK government and academia to shape the future direction of hard infrastructure within the environmental data landscape