Professor Peter Smith FRS

Pete Smith is the Professor of Soils and Global Change at the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK), and is Science Director of the Scottish Climate Change Centre of Expertise (ClimateXChange).

Since 1996, he has served as Convening Lead Author, Lead Author and Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is a global ecosystem modeller with interests in soils, agriculture, food security, bioenergy, greenhouse gases, climate change, greenhouse gas removal technologies, and climate change impacts and mitigation.

He was a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (2008-2013), and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (since 2008), a Fellow of the Institute of Soil Scientists (since 2015), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (since 2009). He was awarded the British Ecological Society Marsh Award for Climate Change Research in 2014, and the European Geophysical Union Duchaufour Medal for ‘distinguished contributions to soil science’ in 2017.

Professional position

  • Professor of Soils and Global Change, Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen

Subject groups

  • Earth and environmental sciences

    Climate sciences

  • Organismal biology, evolution and ecology

    Agricultural and forest science, Biological modelling, Ecology (incl behavioural ecology), Environmental biology, Soil science

  • Other

    Science policy

Professor Peter Smith FRS
Elected 2017