Chair, Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change; UK's Low Carbon Business Ambassador; Chair, Carbon Trust; Chair, STEM Learning Ltd

Keynote Plenary: Session 1

Baroness Brown is a Crossbench Member of the House of Lords, an engineer with extensive experience in industry and academia. She is passionate about science education and climate change. Baroness Brown was Vice Chair of the Climate Change Committee for 12 years and is Chair of the Adaptation Committee of the CCC, and a member of the Hydrogen Advisory Council. She chairs The Carbon Trust, is a non-executive director of Ørsted and of Ceres Power, and was a Non-executive Director of the Green Investment Bank. She led the King Review on decarbonising transport (2007) for the UK Government. She chairs the not-for-profit company STEM Learning Ltd, whose mission is to ensure every young person in the UK benefits from an inspiring STEM education, delivered through teacher CPD, Enthuse Partnerships, extensive online resources, and programmes including STEM Clubs and STEM Ambassadors.

Mock COP26 Campaign Coordinator and International Campaign Coordinator, Teach the Future

Keynote Plenary: Session 1

Josh is a climate activist who is currently spending his gap year campaigning ahead of COP26.

He worked as an Event Coordinator for Mock COP26, an international online youth conference filling the void left by the postponement of COP26, where he now works as a Campaign Coordinator. Josh is also the International Campaign Coordinator at Teach the Future (a UK climate education campaign). He has been appointed by the UK COP26 Presidency as the UK's Youth Representative on the Government of Italy's Youth4Climate Advisory Committee.

CEO at The Wildlife Trusts and University of Reading alumnus

Keynote Plenary: Session 2

Craig became Chief Executive of The Wildlife Trusts in April 2020. He has been described as “one of the country’s top environmental campaigners”, by The Guardian as "the very model of a modern eco-general" and has been listed as one of the UK's top "social media CEOs". Craig was previously CEO of Friends of the Earth where he refocused the organisation on its unique role of empowering communities to take action to tackle the climate and ecological crisis.

He is Honorary Professor of Sustainability and Innovation at Alliance Manchester Business School.

COP Working Group, UK Youth Climate Coalition

Keynote Plenary: Session 2

Serena is 23 years old, from London, and has just graduated from a mathematics and biology undergraduate degree. She has been engaging with United Nations Climate Change for five years, working on thematics such as climate education and empowerment. She was elected as the 2019 Global Focal Point to the UN Climate Change youth constituency and currently sits as the youth representative on a UNFCCC technology task force. She is a Programme Coordinator for the 16th UN Climate Change Conference of Youth, as well as the UK youth delegate to the Pre-COP Milan youth event. She also volunteers with the UK Youth Climate Coalition and works on several other climate projects in her spare time.

Broadcast Science Editor and University of Reading alumnus

Keynote Plenary: Session 1

Tom began his career covering science and the environment at the science journal, Nature. He went on to become science correspondent at ITN, first with Channel 4 News, then ITV News.

He has covered four global climate summits and reported on climate impacts, policies and possible solutions at home and around the world.

At the end of September 2021, he is taking up a new role as Science and Technology Editor at Sky News.

Broadcast meteorologist and University of Reading alumna

Keynote Plenary: Session 2

Laura studied physics and meteorology at the University of Reading before graduating and joining the Met Office on the forecaster training programme. Her first forecasting job was at RAF Brize Norton where she forecast hazardous weather for pilots flying all over the world. She then joined the BBC Weather Centre where she forecast weather across TV, radio and online. She has been presenting the weather on breakfast television for nine years to millions of people. As well as weather, she includes as much science as possible, from climate change to space. In 2020, she visited NASA's Houston Space Center to interview astronauts about the new Artemis mission to send the first woman and next man to the moon.

Ed is a climate scientist in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, and a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report. His research examines how and why the climate has changed since the industrial revolution, and how it may change over the coming decades, particularly the interplay between natural climate variations and human-caused trends. He also leads Weather Rescue – a citizen science project involving thousands of volunteers – which is recovering millions of lost Victorian-era weather observations from handwritten archives and turning them into invaluable digital data. Ed also actively engages with a variety of audiences about climate change, especially through blogs, social media and graphical visualisations. 

Ella is a climate scientist at the University of Reading who works on aviation, clouds and polar climate change.

She is a passionate communicator and educator who works hard to make climate science more accessible and runs the Dr Gilbz YouTube channel. She regularly appears on TV and radio to talk about climate change and was included in the Sunday Times' 2021 Green Power List as one of the top ten environmentalists under 30.