People

Dr John Siddorn is Chief Executive of the National Oceanography Centre.

Since joining NOC in 2020 as Associate Director of Digital Ocean; John has championed the embedding of digital approaches to furthering science, including through the use of digital twins and has been key to thought leadership in his field and in shaping the current landscape of digital twin innovation.

Prior to joining NOC, John held positions at the Met Office where he was Head of the Ocean Forecasting R&D Department (OFRD) group and co-chair of the National Partnership for Ocean Prediction (NPOP). His personal research was on developing ocean models with a focus on interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, and understanding how those interactions underpin predictability for climate and for high impact events. Amongst other responsibilities, he led the Newton Programme’s India project which developed the science and modelling capability across climate and weather timescales, coordinating work in the Met Office and in UK academia with that at the Ministry of Earth Science in India.

John’s background is in shelf seas modelling and he led the ocean model developments based on NEMO for applications across the Met Office for a number of years before becoming Head of Ocean Forecasting in 2014.

Prior to his career at the Met Office John worked for the Natural Environmental Research Council at Plymouth Marine Laboratory as a mathematical modeller in a biogeochemistry modelling team with the primary responsibility for implementing marine dynamical models