Climate change expert. Born in Dundee, Skea was educated at Grove Academy and then studied mathematical physics at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1975. He completed his doctorate at Clare College, Cambridge, three years later. Skea began his research career at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, before moving to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh (USA) and then returned to the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in 1983 rising to become a Professorial Fellow in 1994 and then Director of the Policy Studies Institute (1998 - 2004). He was appointed as Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College in London in 2009. He has authored over 100 publications on subjects from the use of coal, electricity generation, pollution, renewable energy, energy diversification and decarbonisation, and was writing about global warming in the 1980s.
Skea was a founding member of the UK Committee on Climate Change (2008-18), served as the first Chair of Scotland's Just Transition Commission (2019-23), and was appointed Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2023. He was awarded an OBE in 2004 and a CBE in 2013.
