Dr Janice Lough

Biography

I am a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS, Townsville) and Adjunct Professorial Research Fellow and Partner Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Reef Studies, James Cook University. I am a climate scientist who has been publishing on issues related to climate change for over 30 years. I have a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. She completed a PhD in 1982 at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, on tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures and climate in sub-Saharan Africa. She held an NSF-funded post-doctoral position at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, from 1982 to 1986. In 1986 she came to AIMS for a two-year postdoctoral position working with environmental records from corals and has been a research scientist at AIMS since 1988.Current research activities focus on 1) obtaining annual proxy environmental and growth records from massive corals over the past several centuries; this places current changes in an historical context and recent publications have, for example, highlighted how coral calcification rates are already changing in response to warming of the tropical oceans and that rainfall in northeastern tropical Australia has become more variable and more extreme when examined over the past three centuries, and 2) assessing how climate is already changing for tropical marine ecosystems; climate change is not a future event, significant warming of the tropical oceans has already occurred with observable consequences for coral reefs.

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