Duncan Wingham, a climate physicist at University College London, has been appointed chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council from 1 January 2012. Wingham is the chairman of the council’s Science and Innovation Strategy Board and the lead investigator of the European Space Agency’s CryoSat and CryoSat-2 satellite missions. He was founder of the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, and its director from 2000 to 2005.