Bio
I began as a natural scientist, my early (PhD) research concerned measuring how phytoplankton affect the kinetics of air-ocean CO2 fluxes.
In parallel I became involved in global climate policy, attending many UNFCC and IPCC meetings, later within the Belgian government delegation.
I developed the JCM interactive model, since 2000, to address gaps I perceived between climate science and policy, to enable citizens to experiment for themselves. I could do this as I’m also a self-taught programmer (since age 8), and recently found scala3 the best of many languages I tried.
My model (JCM, now SWIM), and derived analyses, were presented at many conferences over many years.
(more info: http://benmatthews.eu/papers.html - to be updated soon )
I am now Belgian, but native english, have a multilingual family. Currently independent, I previously worked in universities / institutes in (chronologically) Scotland, England, China, Denmark, Norway Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil. However I resist flying to conferences, to respect the climate. I also focused on dynamic web tools rather than static papers. These were challenging attitudes for a scientific career. Rather than developing one cog in a big machine (as for typical integrated assessment climate models), I try to keep an overview of the whole system, how the cogs interact, and help others learn from that.
Although I never presented my model specifically in a code-developer conference, I have plenty of experience presenting my topics in scientific fora. So whilst I may not tick all your usual boxes, I certainly bring something new and relevant to this conference.