Professor David Karoly

Professor David Karoly FAA is a Chief Research Scientist in the CSIRO Climate Science Centre, based in Aspendale and an honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is an internationally recognised expert on climate change and climate variability.

His career, his interests and his values are built on foundations from his undergraduate studies at Monash more than four decades ago.

He is passionate about science, the environment, effective communication, seizing opportunities, and managing change.

David completed his honours degree in Science in 1976, majoring in Applied Mathematics and Physics. It was some of the other things that he did at Monash then that shaped his life and his career. As an active member of the Monash Bushwalking Club, he followed his interests in outdoor activities and experienced our beautiful natural environment as often as he could. He took a summer vacation job at CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Physics in Aspendale at the end of 1974 and a new career path was opened. He could combine mathematics and physics with his interests in the natural environment to study weather and climate.  He completed his PhD in Meteorology at the University of Reading in England in 1980, and returned to Australia to a postdoctoral position with CSIRO based in the Bureau of Meteorology.

David returned to Monash University as a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics in 1983, teaching applied maths to recalcitrant engineering students and improving his communications skills. His research initially was on climate variability; droughts, floods, heatwaves and bushfires, then moved on to climate change in the late 1980s. After twenty years at Monash and leading the School of Mathematical Sciences for two years, in 2003 he was head-hunted by the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma to hold the Williams Chair and build a new research group on climate change there.

Another opportunity came when David was awarded an ARC Federation Fellowship, funded by the Australian government, and he moved to the University of Melbourne in 2007 as Professor of Atmospheric Science. He quickly became one of Australia’s leading scientists involved in communication on climate change to government, business, community groups and the media. In 2019, David was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

David’s most recent activities have been as Leader of the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub from 2018 until it closed in June 2021, in the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program. This has brought together many threads from his career, as it was a research and outreach partnership between CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and five universities including both Monash and the University of Melbourne.