Dr. Piers Sellers earned his B.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh and his Ph.D. from Leeds University. He also completed pilot training at the Royal Air Force. In 1982, he moved from the U.K. to the U.S. in 1982 to carry out climate research at NASA/GSFC, where, from 1982 to 1996, he worked on global climate problems, particularly those involving interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and was involved in constructing computer models of the global climate system, satellite data interpretation and conducting large-scale field experiments in the U.S., Canada, Africa, and Brazil. In 1998, he was the project scientist for the first large Earth Observing System platform, Terra. In 1996, he joined the NASA astronaut corps and has flown on three space missions to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002, 2006, and 2010, carrying out six spacewalks and working on ISS assembly tasks. Since 2011, Dr. Sellers has served as the deputy director of NASA Goddard's Sciences and Exploration Directorate and continues his climate research.

He is the recipient of the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award, the Arthur Fleming Award, the AMS Houghton Award, and, most recently, in 2011, Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for services to science, and is a Fellow both AGU and AMS.