I am a climate scientist, geobiologist, and climate policy scholar. I serve at Rutgers University as Director of the Rutgers 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.
I’m one of the directors of the Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration of more than two dozen climate scientists, economists, data scientists and policy scholars, working to bring Big Data approaches to the assessment of the economic risks of climate change.
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 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s forthcoming (2021) Sixth Assessment Report, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report and Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus. 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 cities.
In addition to the Rutgers Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, I am also a member of the Rutgers Climate Institute and the Rutgers Energy 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
Sea-level rise will likely render atolls uninhabitable in the lifetime of the Marshall Islands’ youth – but not in the next two decades
The threat of sea-level rise does not just come from the permanent encroachment of the ocean upon the land. It comes – and sooner – from the way in which a h...
It may take decades to determine how high sea level will rise
Our new study links a framework for global and local sea-level rise projections with simulations of two major mechanisms by which climate change can affect t...
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...
In the media
- Science on the Hill (June 2020)
- NJTV News (December 2019)
- The Conversation (April 2019)
- Resources Radio (January 2019)
- Radio Times with Mary Cummings-Jordan [WHYY] (November 2018)
- Science Friday (November 2018)
- E&E News Off Topic (November 2018)
- Reddit AMA (December 2017)
- New York Times (November 2017)
- 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)