Rate My Professor Hilmar Gudmundsson

Hilmar Gudmundsson is Professor in the School of Geography and Natural Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, where he has been a full professor since 2018. He earned two BSc degrees, one in Physics and another in Geophysics, from the University of Iceland, followed by a Diploma in Physics (Dipl. Phys. ETH) from ETH Zurich in 1989 and a PhD in glaciology from ETH Zurich in 1994. In 2004, he submitted his habilitation to ETH Zurich and was awarded the Venia Legendi, lecturing there as a Privatdocent. His career trajectory includes a visiting scholarship at the University of Washington, Seattle, from late 1994 to 1995, a lectureship at ETH Zurich until 2001—during which he served as Head of Research in the Glaciology section from 1998 to 2001—and a position as research scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK, from 2001 to 2018. Gudmundsson has held prominent leadership positions, including President of the European Geosciences Union Division for Cryospheric Sciences from 2009 to 2013 and Vice-President of the International Glaciological Society from 2018 to 2020. He currently leads Northumbria University's research peak of excellence, The Future of Ice on Earth, the UK's largest university group dedicated to numerical modelling of large ice sheets and process studies on glacier dynamics and their roles in the climate system.

Gudmundsson's research centers on glaciology, with a focus on processes governing the flow of glaciers and ice sheets, their responses to environmental perturbations, and resultant climatic feedbacks. Utilizing integrated observational, numerical, and theoretical methods, he examines phenomena such as Marine Ice Sheet Instability affecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Surface Elevation Mass Balance Instability linked to the Greenland Ice Sheet. He has supervised approximately 30 PhD students and 20 postdocs and is frequently invited to teach glacial dynamics courses worldwide, holding visiting professorships at Caltech in 2014, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013, the Indian Institute of Science in 2015, and l’Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse from 2015 to 2018. Among his influential publications are Deep glacial troughs and stabilizing ridges unveiled beneath the margins of the Antarctic ice sheet (Nature Geoscience, 2020), Retreat of Pine Island Glacier controlled by marine ice-sheet instability (Nature Climate Change, 2014), Ice-shelf buttressing and the stability of marine ice sheets (The Cryosphere, 2013), and Instantaneous Antarctic ice sheet mass loss driven by thinning ice shelves (Geophysical Research Letters, 2019).