Thomas Stocker was born in Zürich and obtained a PhD in Natural Sciences of ETH Zürich in 1987. He held research positions at University College London, McGill University (Montreal), Columbia University (New York) and University of Hawaii (Honolulu). Since 1993 he is Professor of Climate and Environmental Physics at the University of Bern. His research encompasses the development of climate models of intermediate complexity, modelling past and future climate change, and the reconstruction of the chemical composition of precipitation and greenhouse gas concentrations based on ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. Thomas Stocker has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers in the area of climate dynamics and paleoclimate modeling and reconstruction. After more than 10 years of service in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) he has been elected Co-Chair of Working Group I "The Physical Science Basis" of the IPCC in 2008.