CESM Workshop 2022

Rob Jackson and his lab examine the many ways people affect the Earth. They seek basic scientific knowledge and use it to help shape policies and reduce the environmental footprint of global warming, energy extraction, and other issues. They're currently examining the effects of climate change and droughts on forest mortality and grassland ecosystems. They are also working to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Global Carbon Project (globalcarbonproject.org), which Jackson chairs; examples of new research Rob leads include establishing a global network of methane tower measurements at more than 80 sites worldwide and measuring and reducing methane emissions from oil and gas wells, city streets, and homes and buildings.

Galen McKinley is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. She is Deputy Director of the Center for Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP), an NSF Science Technology Center (STC) for 2021-2026. Professor McKinley is an ocean, carbon cycle and climate scientist whose research focuses on the physical, chemical and ecological drivers of the ocean’s anthropogenic carbon sink. She works across scales from global to the North Atlantic to the Laurentian Great Lakes. Her research tools include models of the ocean and climate, and data analysis using machine learning.

Professor McKinley earned a BS in Civil Engineering from Rice University (1995) and a PhD in Climate Physics and Chemistry from MIT (2002). Her postdoctoral work was at the Instituto Nacional de Ecologia in Mexico and Princeton University. From 2004-2017, she was professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at University of Wisconsin – Madison. Professor McKinley contributions to scientific coordination and advising include being an active member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Ocean Studies Board and of the JASON Advisory Group. Selected honors include the 2020 Ocean Science Voyager award from the American Geophysical Union and, in 2011, the Class of 1955 Teaching Award at University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Laure Zanna is a Professor in Mathematics & Atmosphere/Ocean Science at the Courant Institute, New York University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of the climate system and the main emphasis of her work is to study the influence of the ocean on local and global scales. Prior to NYU, she was a faculty member at the University of Oxford until 2019, and obtained her PhD in 2009 in Climate Dynamics from Harvard University. She was the recipient of the 2020 Nicholas P. Fofonoff Award from the American Meteorological Society “For exceptional creativity in the development and application of new concepts in ocean and climate dynamics”. She is the lead principal investigator of the NSF-NOAA Climate Process Team on Ocean Transport and Eddy Energy, and M2LInES – an international effort to improve climate models with scientific machine learning. She currently serves as an editor for the Journal of Climate, a member on the International CLIVAR Ocean Model Development Panel, and on the CESM Advisory Board.