I am a climate and sea-level scientist and a climate policy scholar. I serve at Rutgers University as a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and as co-director of the University Office of Climate Action.
I direct the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH), an NSF-funded consortium led by Rutgers. MACH works within the Philadelphia-New York City-New Jersey region to both 1) facilitate flexible, equitable, and robust multidecadal planning to manage climate risk, and 2) advance the scientific understanding of how interactions among coastal climate hazards, changing landforms, and human decisions shape climate risk.
I’m one of the directors of the Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration of more than three 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, the interactions between physical climate change and the economy, and the use of climate risk information to inform decisionmaking.
I am a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2017 Fourth National Climate Assessment and Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus. I have also served on sea-level rise expert groups for several states and cities.
From 2017-2021, I served as director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS). In addition to the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and EOAS, 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.
In the media
- Radio Times [WHYY] (August 2021)
- Climate Now (April 2021)
- Science on the Hill (June 2020)
- NJTV News (December 2019)
- The Conversation (April 2019)
- Resources Radio (January 2019)
- Radio Times [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)
Recent Posts
Climate extension could unlock the higher education sector as a catalyst of societal climate action
With a land-grant-style and land-grant-scale investment in climate extension, we could really unlock the role of higher education as a catalyst of societal c...
Coastal climate researchers comment on draft US Army Corps New York/New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries Study
Ten researchers associated with the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub submitted comments to the US Army Corps on the NY & NJ Harbor & Tributaries Focu...
Work with public higher ed to advance a green, just recovery
We are facing at least three overlapping and intersecting crises, operating on different timescales: the four-hundred year crisis of racist violence in Ameri...