2024 Keynote Speaker

Truth, Ethics, and Climate Change: How Can We Save The Planet in an Era of Misinformation?

Steve Easterbrook, Ph.D.

Steve Easterbrook is the Director of the School of the Environment and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. (1991) in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK), and joined the faculty at the School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex. From 1995-99, he was lead scientist at NASA´s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, and the Earth Observation System. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999. His research interests range from modelling and analysis of complex adaptive systems to the socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction. His current research is in climate informatics, where he studies how climate scientists develop computational models to improve their understanding of earth systems and climate change, and the broader question of how that knowledge is shared with other communities.

He has been a visiting scientist at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, in Exeter, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, and the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris. His latest book, “Computing the Climate: How we know what we know about climate change” tells the story of climate models and the scientists who build them.