Joëlle Gergis

Joëlle Gergis is an Australian climate scientist and author specializing in Southern Hemisphere climate variability and change, based in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. She is a senior lecturer at the Fenner School of Environment and Society. Her research fields include climatology, climate change processes, paleoclimatology, and Australian history. In 2013, Gergis was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award fellowship, and her team won the 2014 Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research. She was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report in 2022. She is also a sitting member of the Climate Council.

Education
Gergis completed a BSc in advanced science and environmental science at the University of New South Wales in 2000. Since 2003 she has presented 77 scientific abstracts at national and international scientific meetings and authored 77 climate variability and change publications. Her work has been covered on Australian and international television. Gergis received her PhD in high-resolution palaeoclimatology from the University of New South Wales in 2006.

Career
Gergis participated in Work for the Dole, an Australian workfare program. Centrelink Master Program advised her to remove the PhD from her resume in order to make her more employable. Gergis decided instead to enroll in a professional writing course.

The following year, Gergis was one of three national finalists for the 2007 Eureka Prize for Young Leaders in Environmental Issues and Climate Change, and was one of nineteen Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists’ Science Leaders Scholarship recipients selected nationwide. Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, was one of her mentors during the program aimed at training outstanding young scientists to help bridge the communication gap between science and public policy. In 2008, Gergis was nominated for a Reuters/IUCN Awards for Excellence in Environmental Journalism for feature writing.

Between 2009 and 2014, Gergis led the Aus2K working group for international environmental research organisation Past Global Changes (PAGES), which aimed to improve the accuracy of future climate projections by reconstructing the past 2000 years of climate across the world. The Aus2K group studied Australasian climate variability over the previous 2,000 years, coordinating the development of a 1,000-year temperature reconstruction of the region for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. One of the studies involved using climate proxies such as tree-rings, lake sediments, corals, and ice cores to recreating 3000 different historical contexts including the meteorological conditions the First Fleet endured, as documented by William Bradley aboard the HMS Sirius, and examining claims about a mediaeval warm period. Gergis was the lead author in a study published in the Journal of Climate and drawing on decades of work by 30 scientists.

In 2012 Gergis completed the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's esteemed Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing. She has published articles for the Sydney Morning Herald, Australasian Science, The Conversation, and Cosmos science magazine, as well as literary non-fiction titles including Wet Ink. In June 2012 she was awarded a Writers Victoria Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship for an Emerging Writer.

Also in 2012, Gergis was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship, and her team won the 2014 Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research. In 2015, Gergis was awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne.

In February 2018, she was selected to serve as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. In August 2018, Gergis joined the Climate Council – Australia's leading independent body providing expert advice to the Australian public on climate change and policy.