Gideon Henderson

Education

Henderson graduated with an Honours degree in Earth Sciences from Hertford College, Oxford. He next went to Street John"s College, Cambridge, to complete a Doctor of Philosophy supervised by Professor Sir Keith O"Nions (1990–1994).

Career

His work focuses on low temperature geochemistry, and on improving the understanding of the mechanisms driving climate change. Henderson is currently Head of Department at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford. He then became a University Lecturer in Environmental Earth Sciences, BFD at the University of Oxford.

Since 2007, Henderson has held the position of Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford.

He leads the research group "Isotopes and the Environment" and is a Sollas Fellow of University College, Oxford.

Achievements

• Include European Union of Geosciences outstanding young scientist award (2001), and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2001. He is a member of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) Planning Group for GEOTRACES, an international study of the global marine biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and their isotopes. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (Federal Reserve System), his nomination read: "Gideon Henderson has developed new techniques for determining the timescales, magnitude and effects of past global climate change. His work led to the rejection of many proposed mechanisms of glacial-interglacial Carbon dioxide cycles and to the realisation that these are driven by processes in the southern ocean. With new approaches to dating sediments he showed that certain glacial cycles are inconsistent with models of orbital forcing and was able to quantify weathering fluxes. He bridged the gap between modellers and geochemists in developing ocean circulation calculations that mimic proxy data and leading a new international initiative to understand ocean compositions.".

Membership

Royal Society.