I am a climate scientist, geobiologist, and climate policy scholar. I serve at Rutgers University as Director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences and as a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. I also co-direct Rutgers’ transdisciplinary Coastal Climate Risk & Resilience (C2R2) initiative, a training program which brings graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and urban planning together with coastal stakeholders to tackle the challenges that climate change poses to the world’s coastlines.
My research focuses on understanding uncertainty in past and future climate change, with major emphases on sea-level change and on the interactions between physical climate change and the economy. I am a lead author of Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus and served as lead scientist for the technical analysis underlying the Risky Business Project. I was a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, and have served on sea-level rise expert groups for several states and and the city of Boston.
In addition to the Rutgers Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and the Rutgers Energy Institute, I am also a member of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and of the Rutgers Climate Institute. I am affiliated with Rutgers graduate programs in Atmospheric Sciences, Geological Sciences, Oceanography, Statistics, and Planning and Public Policy.
Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, I served as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Policy and International Affairs and as a Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. I received my Ph.D. in geobiology from Caltech and my undergraduate degree in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago.
Recent Posts
Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140: A review
In my review of Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, I argue that fiction can play a critical role in inspiring creative rethinks of climate adaptation.
Coasts in Times of Sea-Level Rise (video)
I presented an talk on past, present, and future sea-level rise and climate risk to the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences in October.
Global sea-level change over the Common Era
I and my collaborators at Rutgers, Tufts, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, York, Woods Hole, and Harvard have published a new paper, to app...
The Deadly Combination of Heat and Humidity (a technical note)
Jon Buzan, Matt Huber and I authored an article in the June 7, 2015, New York Times that looks at the recent heat wave in India – one of the most deadly in t...
In the media
- The Conversation (June 2017)
- The Conversation (November 2016)
- The Conversation (June 2016)
- Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane [WHYY] (February 2016)
- PRI’s The World (February 2016)
- New York Times Sunday Review (June 2015)
- Rutgers Today (Dec. 2014)
- Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane [WHYY] (July 2014)
- New York Times Sunday Review (Nov. 2012)