Simon has been Policy Director at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London since September 2007. He is a former senior UK diplomat (1986-2007), with broad experience of foreign policy and diplomacy. He has also worked as an economist on international financial stability and market infrastructure at the Bank of England (1998-2002) and in the Ministry of Defence (1988-91). He has a DPhil in Theoretical Physics (1985), an MSc in Financial Economics (University of London, 1999) and a Joint Honours degree (First Class) in Physics and Philosophy (1982). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a member of the IoP’s Committee on International Development. He was awarded a CMG in 2007.

Simon’s recent work has focussed on climate economics and mitigation, international climate policy and on ecosystem services. His paper on “Climate mitigation: sustainable preferences and cumulative carbon” has been accepted for presentation at the 4th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists to be held in Montreal in mid 2010 and submitted for publication. He was a co-author of a recently published paper on “Priority research areas for ecosystem services in a changing world” (Journal of Applied Ecology).