Professor Dowdeswell graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1980, and studied for a Masters Degree at INSTAAR in the University of Colorado and for a PhD in the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

His research interests include the dynamics of large ice masses and their response to climate change; the application of airborne and satellite geophysical techniques in glaciology, and processes and patterns of sedimentation in glacier-influenced marine environments.

He has worked in a number of areas of the Arctic, including Svalbard, Russian Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya, Iceland, East Greenland and Baffin, Devon and Ellesmere Islands in Arctic Canada.

He has also undertaken many periods of work on icebreaking research vessels in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea, in the fjords and on the continental shelves of Svalbard and Greenland, and in Antarctica.

Julian has led a number of alumni tours with Hurtigruten to this part of the world.