Dr. Taylor then left for the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, where he pursued a PhD funded by a University of Maryland Postgraduate Fellowship and later, a National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) Fellowship. He successfully completed his PhD in 1999 and returned to teach in the Department of Physics in the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences at UWI Mona. It is from this base of research and teaching that he has received an International Young Scientist Award (2004), a Young Scientist/Technologist Award from the Scientific Research Council of Jamaica (2005), and no less than three UWI Mona Research Awards (2003, 2007 and 2008).

Dr. Michael Taylor is currently the Head of the Department of Physics and the Director of the Climate Studies Group, Mona.  His research interests include Caribbean climate variability, climate projections using dynamic and statistical downscaling, climate extremes, climate change adaptation and renewable energy.  He has served as project investigator for a number of climate variability and change projects and has authored a number of journal articles, technical reports, monographs and conference papers. Dr. Taylor is a member of the steering committees for a number of climate change initiatives.

In the year after Dr. John Charlery entered a BSc programme at UWI (1986) he began work as a professional meteorologist. Over the next 15 years he went on earn a Diploma in Tropical Meteorology (Miami), an Advanced Diploma in Computer Science, MPhil and PhD degrees from UWI.

After completing his PhD and winning the award for Best Researched Thesis, he served for one year as Deputy Director of Barbados Meteorological Services. Since 2002, Dr. Charlery has been a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics at the UWI Cave Hill Campus. One year after he joined The UWI staff, he was also appointed Coordinator of Computer Science and Information Technology, a position he currently fulfils alongside his regular responsibilities in teaching and research.

Dr. Charlery is particularly enthralled by the dynamics of the earth’s atmosphere and its responses to the natural and anthropogenic triggers. Hence, one of his primary areas of research is in Climate Modelling and Simulation. His counter-balancing interest is in Computer Visualization of dynamical systems. His research focus therefore lies at the crossroads of these two activities.