Neil, an associate professor of atmospheric science in the Department of Geoscience at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS), received a Ph.D. and M.S. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed a B.S. in meteorology from the State University of New York at Oswego. Before joining the faculty at HWS in 2004, he taught for two years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a research scientist at the Illinois State Water Survey for nine years where he worked on a variety of research projects ranging from mesoscale modeling to collecting field measurements with aircraft, sounding, and radar systems.

Neil has maintained an active research program involving undergraduate students with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for projects that are collaborative with several research scientists and National Weather Service Forecast Offices around the United States. He was an editor for the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (JAMC), a publication of the American Meteorological Society, from 2010-2011 and prior to that had been an associate editor of JAMC since 2004. He has also been a long-time member of several scholarly associations including Sigma Xi, American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and the Council on Undergraduate Research. Closer to home, Neil also remains actively involved with the Finger Lakes Institute, a division of HWS dedicated to the promotion of environmental research and education about the Finger Lakes and its surrounding environments.