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The University of Reading is a world leader in climate science, and winner of the Queen’s Anniversary Prize.

We have won numerous accolades for our climate and sustainability work, including:

  • Sustainable University of the Year, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, 2025
  • 1st in the People & Planet University League 2023/24, and 4th in 2024/25
  • Winner of Outstanding Contribution to Sustainability Leadership, London Higher Award 2024
  • First ever winner of the Times Higher Education Outstanding Contribution to Environmental Leadership award, 2023.

Our School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Science was awarded the Athena Swan Silver in 2023, in recognition of good employment practices related to women working in science, engineering and technology.

Our research

Research at Reading is divided into four broad themes:

Summary of potential PhD projects

Improving past climate reconstruction using machine learning

Currently, climate reconstructions over the last century have large uncertainties because algorithms used to assimilate observations with models only take observations prior to the times of interest, because they were designed for numerical weather prediction. Using rapidly developing machine learning algorithms, you will explore ways of projecting observations backwards in time to improve the full temporal consistency, leading to better understanding of change.

Supervisors

  • Keith Haines (University of Reading and National Centre for Earth Observation)
  • Yumeng Chen (University of Reading and National Centre for Earth Observation)
  • Daniel Lea (Met Office, UK).

Partner

Met Office, UK.