Sonia Seneviratne

Sonia Seneviratne is Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich, where she was appointed in 2007. She is a climate scientist and environmental physicist. After her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Lausanne and ETH Zurich, she was awarded her PhD thesis in climate science in 2003 at ETH Zurich. She did research stays at MIT, Boston (USA) in 1998-1999 and the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland (USA) in 2003-2004. Her research addresses climate change and extreme events, land-climate interactions, and terrestrial water processes. She was a Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author on several IPCC reports, including the IPCC Special Report on Extreme events (SREX, 2012), the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C Global warming (2018), and the IPCC 6th Assessment report (2021).
Sonia Seneviratne belongs to the most cited scientists in her field (https://clarivate.com/highly-cited-researchers). She received several awards for her research, including a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (2014), the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2013), and the Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union (2021: https://www.egu.eu/awards-medals/hans-oeschger/).