Professor Jacqueline McGlade

Executive Director

Professor McGlade became Executive Director of the European Environment Agency on June 1 2003. Prior to this she was Natural Environment Research Council Professorial Fellow in Environmental Informatics in the Mathematics Department of University College London where her main areas of research included spatial data analysis and informatics, expert systems, environmental technologies and the international politics of the environment and natural resources.

Previous appointments have included Director of the UKs Centre for Coastal & Marine Sciences, Director of Theoretical Ecology at the Forschungszentrum Jlich Germany, Associate Professor at the Honda funded International Ecotechnology Research Centre, Senior Scientist in the Federal Government of Canada and in the USA, Adrian Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge and Professorships at Warwick University and Aachen. Professor McGlade has won various prizes including the Minerva Prize, the Swedish Jubileum Award and the Brno University Gold Medal. She also has Honorary degrees from Wales (Bangor) Kent and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture & Commerce.

Professor McGlade has worked extensively in North America, south-east Asia and west Africa; she has published more than 100 research papers, written popular articles, presented and appeared in many radio and television programmes, including her own BBC series The Ocean Planet and Learning from Nature and more recently Our Arctic Challenge, a film about sport and tourism in Greenland. She has given public lectures worldwide on climate change, energy and sustainable development, environmental information, conflicts over environmental impacts of industrial and natural activities, environmental technologies and the use of multimedia and modern forms of web communication.

Professor McGlade was Chairman of The Earth Centre and a Board Member of the Environment Agency. She is currently a Trustee of the Natural History Museum, and a member of the Environment Advisory Committee of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, UK-China Forum and UK-Japan 21st Century Group. She is also Director of the software company, View the World Ltd.

Recent books: Advanced Ecological Theory (Blackwell 1999); The Gulf of Guinea Large Marine Ecosystem (Elsevier 2002).