Geoscience Research Directorate | Climate Change

Prof. Mike Ellis
Head of Science, Climate Change

Mike Ellis comes to the BGS after three years as the founding Program Director of Geomorphology and Land-use Dynamics (GLD) at the National Science Foundation in the USA. He designed the program to support and foster process-based investigations of landscape evolution as a function of climate and/or tectonic forcing, and as emergent phenomena of the internal dynamics of this complex earth system. He was also the principal program director for the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, for the Critical Zone Observatory at Boulder Creek, Colorado, and co-technical coordinator of the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics. Mike has served on the National Oceanographic Partnership Program panel for Arctic coastal research, and was a member of the science team to develop a US Federal interagency program in coastal research. Ellis recently initiated a National Research Council study and a series of parallel state-of-the-art workshops in Earth surface processes, and he led the development of the new Focus Group in Earth and Planetary Surface Processes at the American Geophysical Union. Prior to the NSF connection, Ellis was a Professor of Geology at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, where he was involved in landscape evolution and its connection to both climate and tectonics for close to two decades. Ellis received a PhD in geology in 1984 from Washington State University, and a BSc in geology from the University College of Wales, Swansea.