Raymond T. Pierrehumbert

Raymond Pierrehumbert joined the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT in 2026 as Professor of the Practice. Previously, Pierrehumbert served as the Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2015, where he established the Planetary Climate Dynamics Lab.

Pierrehumbert’s research spans the origin and evolution of atmospheres and climate systems, from the Earth to solar system bodies and exoplanets. His contributions to atmospheric physics include pioneering work on stability theory and dynamical systems applications to fluid motion.

Ray earned his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT in 1980 and holds a BA in physics from Harvard. Before Oxford, he held faculty positions at MIT, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. He is the author of the textbook Principles of Planetary Climate and was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report.

Among numerous distinctions, Pierrehumbert is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, and the Royal Society, and was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the Republic of France.