Edwards became interested in physics after reading A Brief History of Time. The daughter of Michael Edwards, she completed A-Levels in Physics, Chemistry and Maths at St Margaret's School, in Exeter. She studied physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. She completed a PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Brian Cox. Her thesis investigated the production of Z bosons, detected by their subsequent decay to muons, using data collected at the Tevatron.
Research and career
Edwards joined the Open University as a lecturer, working in the Palaeoenvironmental Change team. She uses computer models to predict and study climate change, with a particular interest in the impact on sea level rise of changes in the Antarctic ice sheet. She studied how a glacier's grounding line affects the rate of flow of glaciers, and estimated the effects of positive feedback. In 2017 Edwards joined King's College London as a lecturer in geography. She will be a lead author for Chapter 9 of the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edwards writes a popular science blog hosted by the Public Library of Science. She has written for The Guardian and contributed chapters to books about climate change. Working with the Met Office, Edwards created educational resources about sea level rise for the 2017 United Nations Climate Change Conference. In 2014 she gave a TEDx talk at CERN, How to Love Uncertainty in Climate Science. After fights between climate scientists and sceptics on Twitter in 2014, Edwards was part of a dinner party discussing how they could calm the debate. The dinner included David Rose and Richard A. Betts, and Edwards was the only woman. In 2015 she was celebrated as one of twenty women "making waves" at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. She won the 2016 British Science AssociationCharles Lyell Award for Environmental Sciences. She discussed how computer models can be used to predict ice sheet collapse and how to communicate uncertainty. In 2017 she was profiled in the HuffPost Australia's Breaking The Ice series. She is a speaker at the 2018 Bluedot Festival. Edwards has acted as a scientific consultant for the BBC. She was a consultant on the BBC's Climate Change by Numbers, which won an American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Science Journalism, and a 2015 award for "Best Presentation of Science in an Environment Issue" from EuroPAWS. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service.
