Professor John Plane
Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, University of Leeds
John Plane read Natural Sciences at Cambridge (1979), followed by a PhD in Physical Chemistry (1983) and a research fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge (1982-1985). He was then an associate professor at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami, Florida (1985-1991), before moving to the University of East Anglia, Norwich (1991-2006) and then to the University of Leeds (2006-) as Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry. He investigates phenomena in environments ranging from planetary atmospheres to dust formation around stars, and is a world-leading expert on the chemistry of metals which ablate from cosmic dust particles in upper atmospheres. He has also made significant contributions to understanding interactions between chemistry and climate change in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2017) and the Royal Society (2020), and a member of the Academia Europaea (2022).