Lucy Carpenter

Lucy Jane Carpenter (born 21 October 1969) is a British chemist who is a professor of physical chemistry at the University of York. She was one of the founding scientists and director of the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory (CVAO), established on São Vicente in 2006 and now a key global monitoring site. Her work has helped to transform understanding of how oceans shape the air above them.

Education Carpenter graduated with a BSc in chemistry from the University of Bristol in 1991

Research and career Her group studies the complex interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere, in particular the chemistry of reactive halogens, organic carbon, and reactive nitrogen. Her work on oceanic and atmospheric halogens has established this chemistry as an important component of tropospheric ozone cycling and makes use of gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GCMS).

She helped establish the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, one of a few dozen World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) stations worldwide which monitor climate and air quality gases over long time scales, and was a lead chapter author of the WMO/United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 2014 scientific assessment of ozone depletion. for the Montreal Protocol and presented at the 37th Meeting of the Parties (MOP37) in Nairobi.

Awards and honours Carpenter has received several awards for her research. She received a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 'Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences' in 2006, and was given the Rosalind Franklin Award from the Royal Society in 2015 for "her scientific achievement, her suitability as a role model and her project proposal to promote women in STEM". She received the Tilden Prize in 2017. She was awarded the 2024 Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal "for establishing a critical link between the production of trace gases in and over the oceans, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change".

Carpenter was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to atmospheric chemistry.