Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (born 26 September 1959, in Sydney, Australia), is a biologist and climate scientist specialising in coral reefs, in particular bleaching due to global warming and climate change. He has published over 500 journal articles and been cited over 50,000 times. He is the inaugural Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, and the holder of a Queensland Smart State Premier fellowship (2008–2013). Hoegh-Guldberg has appeared on television, including two Australian Story series profiling his life and work, and radio, and throughout his career has been an active science communicator, including writing a blog and articles for The Conversation and other media outlets. Hoegh-Guldberg was a contributor to the influential IPCC 8 October 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, and was a Coordinating Lead Author of the Chapter 3 of the report. Early life and study Hoegh-Guldberg is of Danish and Irish ancestry and is a direct descendant and namesake of Ove Høegh-Guldberg, a politician in late 18th Century Denmark. His father, the cultural economist Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, was born in Denmark in 1932, and moved to Australia in 1959, where he died 23 February 2016. From an early age Ove wanted to be a scientist, saying "Diver Dan was a great inspiration". He first visited the Great Barrier Reef with his Danish grandfather and grandmother to collect butterflies for a Danish museum. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Science (Hons), and received a scholarship to Oxford University. Before starting he met Leonard Muscatine, a world expert in corals in Los Angeles and changed his plans, sleeping on the floor of the lab to learn from Muscatine, then completing his PhD at UCLA. His PhD thesis focused upon the physiology of corals and their zooxanthellae under thermal stress. Career In 1999, Hoegh-Guldberg published a paper using data from CSIRO and Germany predicting that most corals across the planet will not survive the next century, and the Great Barrier Reef will die in 20–30 years. His evaluation was poorly received at the time, with most experts trying to find fault with his long term predictions but failing to do so. Since then, however, reefs globally have undergone significant bleaching since then, the latest studies documenting an 89% decline in new corals in the Great Barrier Reef compared to historical levels. As of July 2019, he is an author in