Valerie Masson-Delmotte


Valerie Masson-Delmotte is a French climate scientist and Research Director at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, where she works in the Climate and Environment Sciences Laboratory. She uses data from past climates to test models of climate change, and has contributed to several IPCC reports.

Early life and education

Masson-Delmotte was born 29 October 1971 to two English teachers, and she grew up in Nancy, in the northeast of France. She completed a Diploma of Advanced studies in Engineering with honours at the Ecole Centrale Paris in 1993. She also received her PhD in from the same institution in 1996, in fluid physics and transfers. Her doctoral thesis was "Climate simulation of the Holocene means using general circulation models of the atmosphere; Impacts of parameterization”.

Career and impact

After her PhD, Masson-Delmotte began working as a researcher at the Commissariat for Atomic Energy, specifically the Laboratory of Climate and the Environmental Sciences. She became head of a paleoclimate group in 2010, head of a research group in 1998, and completed her habilitation in 2004. Since 2008, she has been the Research Director/Senior Scientist at CEA. Her research includes water vapour monitoring and combines past climate variability with simulations, to address current climate models.
Masson-Delmotte served on numerous national and international projects including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since 2014, she has been a member of the French Research Strategic Council.
She has published extensively, including several books for the general public, as well as children’s books.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

In October 2015, she was elected co-chair of Working Group 1 of the IPCC, which is the group that "examines the physical science basis". She was the co-ordinating lead author of the paleoclimate chapter in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report cycle. Masson-Delmotte is currently leading IPCC's Working Group One's activities for the Sixth Assessment Report cycle.

Awards and honours

Masson-Delmotte won the Martha T. Muse prize for contribution to Antarctic science in 2015. She also won the French-Austrian Prize Amédée in 2014 and the Irène Joliot-Curie prize for the woman scientist of the year in 2013. She won the prize of scientific excellence UVSQ in 2011, and the Descartes Prize of the European Commission for transnational collaborative research: EPICA in 2008. She was associated with the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 awarded to Al Gore and the IPCC. She was co-awarded the Grand Prix Etienne Roth du CEA from the French Academy of Sciences in 2002. In 2019 she was awarded the 2020 Milutin Milankovic Medal by the European Geosciences Union.

Selected works