Philip Stier is Professor of Atmospheric Physics and Head of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. He also heads the Climate Processes Group and serves on the steering group of the Oxford Climate Research Network.
Philip's research addresses physical climate processes in the context of anthropogenic perturbations to the earth system as the underlying cause of climate change and air pollution. His key interests lie in aerosol and cloud physics, their interactions and their role in the climate system. Aerosols are small liquid or solid particles suspended in air of both anthropogenic and natural origin. Cloud droplets form on aerosol particles, so man-made changes in aerosol (precursor) emissions also affect the physics of clouds.
He is also Principal Investigator for a European Research Council project on the highly uncertain effects of aerosols on precipitation, and he leads the new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network iMIRACLI, which brings together leading climate and machine learning scientists from academia and industry across Europe to educate a new generation of climate data scientists.
Philip is passionate about the power of interdisciplinary approaches to address complex questions around the causes and impacts of climate change. Through the Climate Processes Group, Phillip combines work on global climate models, earth observations from satellites and surface and aircraft based in-situ measurements, as well as detailed process models with theory to improve our understanding of the climate system.
Philip obtained his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology & University of Hamburg, Germany and joined Oxford after post-doctoral research at Caltech in Pasadena, USA.
