Kathryn Anne Whaler

Kathryn Anne Whaler

Kathryn Anne “Kathy” Whaler is a professor of geophysics at the University of Edinburgh School of GeoSciences, in the Research Institute of Earth and Planetary Science, and is a member of the Solid Earth Geophysics and Natural Hazards Research Group.

Born in Salisbury, Whaler attended Croydon High School for Girls (with a year at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School). She attended the University of Sussex between 1974 and 1977, graduating with BSc (1st Class Honours) in Mathematical-Physics. Her Ph.D. thesis (1981), completed at the University of Cambridge, was entitled Some applications of inverse theory to geomagnetism.

Whaler stayed at Cambridge in a post-Doctoral role for two years before joining the University of Leeds in 1983 as a lecturer. In 1994, she moved to the University of Edinburgh to take up the Chair of Geophysics.

She was the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, the main Learned Society for solid Earth geophysics in the UK, from 2004 to 2006.

Whaler became President of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) at the 25th IUGG General Assembly in Melbourne, 2011, after four years as Vice-President (2007–11), and Executive Committee member (2003-7).[3] Whaler was elected IUGG Vice President at the 26th IUGG General Assembly in Prague, 2015.

She has undertaken a number of sabbaticals which have given her experience of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Harvard University, the University of California at San Diego (where she was a Green Scholar), Victoria University of Wellington, and Göttingen University (as Gauss Professor), funded by the Fulbright Foundation, NASA, the Cecil H and Ida M Green Foundation, and Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

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  • Organization
    University of Edinburgh School of GeoSciences
  • Profession
    Professor of Geophysics
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