[3] Hall is a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology,[4] commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission,[5] and is President of the Institution of Civil Engineers for the year November 2024 to October 2025.
[8] Hall was born in Sidcup, England, and studied civil engineering at the University of Bristol, with a stage at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausses before graduating in 1990.
He was a civil engineer with Taylor Woodrow Construction from 1987 to 1990 and then served with VSO in Guyana from 1991 to 1993 working on flood protection and drainage projects.
He worked with water specialist HR Wallingford from 1993 to 1995 before returning to Bristol University to undertake a PhD in engineering systems and uncertainty analysis which he completed in 1999.
[29] He also developed the framework for uncertainty analysis in appraisal of options for protecting London from flooding over the 21st century, as part of the Environment Agency's 2012 Thames Estuary 2100 project.
[35] He was part of the team that developed the Tyndall Coastal Simulator which models the response of the East Anglian coast to climate change.
He was a contributing author to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change[39] which won a Nobel Peace Prize.
[40] He was an advisor to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change[41] and led the infrastructure background paper [42] for the Global Commission on Adaptation.
NISMOD has been taken up by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals[56] and has been used to inform infrastructure planning in Curaçao, St Lucia and Ghana.
[58] The work has twice been recognised with the award of the Lloyd's Science Prize[59] and it has been applied to the analysis of infrastructure network resilience in Tanzania, Vietnam, Argentina and China and at global scale.