Dr Lisa Alexander completed her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Applied Mathematics at Queens University in Northern Ireland in 1995 and 1998 respectively. She was a research scientist for the Met Office Hadley Centre in the Climate Variability Group from 1998 to 2006, spending her last year on secondment at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. She completed her PhD at Monash University in 2009, winning the Mollie Holman medal for best doctoral thesis. Since then she has been a senior researcher with the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW.