Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh has received a CBE for services to Climate Science and to the Public Communication of Climate Science in King Charles III's 2025 Birthday Honours.
Professor Shuckburgh (Fellow of Darwin, Trinity alumna) is a world-leading climate scientist at the University of Cambridge, who has been tracking the causes and effects of Earth’s soaring temperatures for decades. Her knowledge and insights on the urgent actions needed to combat climate change are widely sought after by governments, business, policymakers and the media.
"I am deeply honoured to accept this recognition, which is a reflection of the collective efforts of many scientists, communicators, educators, and advocates who strive every day to make climate science accurate, accessible and actionable at a time when honesty, clarity and urgency are more important than ever,” Professor Shuckburgh said.
Alongside leading the University’s major climate change initiative, Cambridge Zero, Emily is also Professor of Environmental Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her primary research is focused on the application of AI to climate science and in this context she is Academic Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, and co-Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER).
Educated in mathematics at Oxford and Cambridge, Emily earned her PhD in atmospheric science in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. She had academic stints at the École Normale Supérieure in France and M.I.T. before embarking on a decade of research at the British Antarctic Survey, where she focused on the polar oceans in a changing climate.
A gifted science communicator, Professor Shuckburgh has collaborated with and advised royalty, global leaders from business and finance, government ministers, celebrities, journalists and more. But there is one person who really influenced her as a Sixth Form student sitting on a beach with a book during school holidays.
“Reading (Sir) David Attenborough’s book Life on Earth, I was struck by the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and I became fascinated with the idea I might be able to use mathematics to better understand it.”
From that moment on, her course was set.
“I still have the book – if you riffle through the pages, bits of sand fall out. Mathematics is valuable in its own right of course, but my passion has been using it in ways that support nature and human society.”
If you would like to find out more about Cambridge research on climate and nature, explore our interactive database Cambridge Climate and Nature or click through to our climate and nature hub for more stories about Cambridge researchers tackling the climate and biodiversity crises.