Bates, Paul D.

Paul David Bates is a hydrologist, working as Professor of Hydrology at the University of Bristol and Chairman of Fathom, a water risk intelligence firm that he cofounded. He was Director of the University of Bristol's Cabot Institute of the Environment from 2011 to 2013 and subsequently Head of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences (2013–2017). In 2012, Bates was awarded the Lloyd's of London Science of Risk prize for his work on numerical solutions of the local inertial form of the shallow water equations. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2015 and received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2017. He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to flood risk management in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. In 2024, Bates received the John Dalton Medal for distinguished research in the hydrology field. He was the recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers 2025 Ven Te Chow Award, which recognises lifetime achievement in the field of hydrological engineering.