Katrin Meissner (scientist)


Katrin Juliane Meissner is a German and Australian physical oceanographer and climate scientist.
Meissner completed an engineering degree at the Ecole Centrale de Lille in 1995, a Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies, at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI, France in 1996, and a Doctor of Physics at the Universität Bremen, Germany in 1999. In 2000, she received the Annette Barthelt Prize for outstanding research in the field of marine science.

Career

Meissner became an Assistant Professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Canada, in 2002. In 2009, she moved to the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her relocation from a tenure-track position in Victoria was in part due to the long term issues of reduced funding for climate change science across Canada.
In 2010, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. She is currently the Director of the Climate Change Research Centre.
In 2015, she was one of the featured scientists in Joe Duggan's project about emotions in the work of scientists focused on climate change.
In June 2018, she was a co-author of a paper in Nature Geoscience which posited that current model-based climate projections could be greatly underestimating the rate of warming.

Research interests

Meissner researches abrupt climate change events, and thresholds and feedbacks in the climate system using Earth System Climate Models together with palaeoclimate records to increase understanding of the basic mechanisms of climate variability and climate change, particularly in the context of terrestrial biogeochemical cycles and ocean circulation.
The work of her and her team developed model studies on rapid climate changes in Australia.

Positions held

Meissner currently holds the following positions: