John Shepherd

John Graham Shepherd, CBE FRS is a British Earth system scientist, professor at University of Southampton, and a former director of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. He has worked on a wide range of environment-related topics, including the transport of chemical tracers in the atmospheric boundary layer and in the deep ocean, the management of marine fish stocks, the dynamics of the Earth system, and more recently led a comprehensive review of geoengineering for the Royal Society. Shepherd was born in 1946 in Croydon in south London, and attended Dr Challoner's Grammar School, a grammar school in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. He studied Natural Sciences at Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge, initially taking physics, mathematics, chemistry and crystallography before specialising and graduating in theoretical physics in 1967. He remained at Cambridge for doctoral studies in the Cavendish Laboratory, working under Brian Pippard FRS on the topic of superconductivity. He completed his doctorate in 1971 with a thesis entitled: "The proximity effect in superconducting/normal sandwiches".