Yadvinder Malhi

Education Malhi was educated at Southend High School for Boys He completed postgraduate study at the University of Reading where he was awarded a PhD in meteorology in 1993 for research on the earth's energy budget and heat fluxes supervised by Alan Ibbetson and George Dugdale.

Research and career Malhi's early career focused on Amazonia, including some of the first measurements of carbon dioxide exchange in tropical forests but in recent years his research interests have expanded across Africa and Asia. He has ongoing projects in Malaysia, the Ankasa Conservation Area, Kakum National Park and Kogyae Strict Nature Reserve in Ghana, Lopé National Park in Gabon, the Serra do Mar coastal forests in Brazil. He also conducts field research in tropical island restoration and in Arctic tundra. In the context of the UK he has particular interests in ecosystems restoration, and also conducts extensive ecological research at Wytham Woods the Amazon rainforest and the Andes. He co-founded the RAINFOR network of forest plots across the Amazon forest (with Oliver Phillips), helped establish a 3500 m elevation transect study in the Amazon-Andes of Peru, and more recently founded the Global Ecosystems Monitoring (GEM) network of intensively studied sites across the tropics.

With Oliver Phillips at the University of Leeds, he co-edited the book Tropical Forests and Global Atmospheric Change published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. He was one of the 620 global contributors to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

As part of his teaching activities, he leads field trips to Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire. the Royal Society, the European Union,

He was President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) over 2017-2019, and was President of the British Ecological Society (2021-2022). On 26 April 2024 Malhi was reappointed for a four-year term.

Awards and honours Malhi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017 having previously been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) from 1999 to 2005.

In 2026 Malhi was elected a Fellow of the British Ecological Society.

Malhi was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to ecosystem science.