Dr. John Walsh is a President s Professor of Global Climate Change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF). He is also the Director of the NOAA/UAF Cooperative Institute for Alaska Research and of the Center for Global Change. His primary research interests are: Arctic climate change over the decade-to-century timescale; predictability of climate change in high latitudes, sea ice variations; and extreme weather events in the context of climate change. He was the lead author for the cryosphere chapter of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (2005) and a lead author for the Polar Regions chapter of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007). He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Climate. Prior to his position at the University of Alaska, Walsh spent 30 years on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana. He is the co-author of an undergraduate textbook on severe and hazardous weather. He earned his Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 and his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1970.