Women of Imperial: Professor Jo Haigh

Professor Joanna Haigh is one of Imperial’s leading scientists. In 2009, she became the first woman to become Head of the Physics Department. As she’s eager to say herself, “It’s a great department and a lot of fantastic science is going on here.”

Recently she’s become co-director of Imperial’s Grantham Institute where she invests resources in people, workshops and students, as well as informs the Government about science. Haigh is additionally a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2013 was appointed a CBE, both great honours.

Haigh’s reputation further demonstrates her importance at Imperial and for women in STEM striving for academic recognition. Her advice to women: “if you’re interested then just go for it, don’t be put off.”

Currently, her research involves measuring how changes in the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation affects our planet’s climate. Most of the radiation is absorbed by the stratosphere.

However, novel research has been investigating how UV radiation might influence the atmosphere below. So, Haigh has been focusing on how the changes in the stratosphere can affect the weather at the surface. She studies the changes in the momentum driving the winds in the stratosphere and how that compares to the atmospheric circulations below. Haigh’s results suggest that when the Sun is more active, the storm tracks (high speed winds pulling the storms across the Atlantic) move slightly closer to the poles, whereas when the sun is less active, they tend to move slightly closer to the equator.

This suggests that middle latitude areas where storm tracks appear, experience the effect the strongest. So, when the sun is less active, you’re more likely to get a colder winter. Therefore, the UK’s climate experiences small but significant effects from the solar cycle.

As put by Haigh, this research “helps us understand what natural factors are influencing the climates that are separate from human factors.”