Professor Sir David King, FRS
Founder and Chair, Climate Crisis Advisory Group
Professor Sir David King is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of Cambridge; Founder and Chair of the Centre for Climate Repair in the University; Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group; an Affiliate Partner of SYSTEMIQ Limited; Senior Strategy Adviser to the President of Rwanda. He served as Founding Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, 2008-2012, Head of the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University, 1993-2000, and Master of Downing College Cambridge 1995 - 2000.
He was the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, 2000-2007, the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change, 2013-2017, and Chair of Future Cities Catapult, 2012-2016. He has travelled widely to persuade all countries to act on climate change. He initiated an in-depth risk analysis approach to climate change, working with the Governments of China and India in, and initiated a collaborative programme, now known as Mission Innovation, to create a £23bn pa research and development international exercise, which involved 22 countries and the EC, to deliver all technologies needed to complete the transition into a fossil-fuel-free world economy.
Elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991; Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002; knighted in 2003; made “Officier dans l’ordre national de la Légion d’honneur” in 2009. In Feb 2022 he was awarded the AAAS David and Betty Hamburg award for Science Diplomacy.