Faculty and Affiliated Faculty

Tony Barnston
Barnston is Head of Forecast Operations at IRI. Prior to coming to IRI in 2000, he was an operational seasonal climate forecaster and developmental researcher in statistical prediction methodology at the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA for 17 years. He received a masters
degree in psychology in 1975, and a masters degree in atmospheric sciences in 1976, both from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He has authored atlases, reports and journal papers on climate variability and empirical prediction, based largely on ENSO and long-term trends. At IRI Barnston ensures the production of a range of IRI forecast products, including monthly forecasts of sea surface temperatures (including an ENSO outlook) and global precipitation and temperature. Two main goals are implementation of the latest prediction research achievements into the real-time forecast products, and facilitating the creation of new versions of the forecast tailored to the needs of specific users.

Mark A. Cane
Director, M.A. Program in Climate and Society; G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University. Dr. Cane received his Ph.D. in meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. Currently, he is chief physical scientist at the IRI and serves on the IRI's International Science and Technical Advisory Committee. With Lamont colleague Dr. Stephen Zebiak, Dr. Cane devised the first numerical model able to simulate El Niño. In 1985 this model was used to make the first physically based forecasts of El Niño. He has also worked extensively on the impact of El Niño on human activity, especially agriculture. His efforts over many years were instrumental in the creation of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. Dr. Cane's recent research interests include paleoclimate problems from the Pliocene to the last millennium., as well as future climate change. Dr. Cane has written some 200 papers on a broad range of topics in oceanography and climatology. In 1992 Dr. Cane received the Sverdrup Gold Medal of the American Meteorological Society, and in 2003 he received the Cody Award in Ocean Sciences from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society; the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Steven A. Cohen
Director, Master of Public Administration Program in Environmental Science and Policy, School of International and Public Affairs; Director, Executive Master of Public Administration Program; Director, Office of Educational Programs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Cohen is the author of The Effective Public Manager (1988), and the coauthor of Environmental Regulation through Strategic Planning (1991), Total Quality Management in Government (1993), The New Effective Public Manager (1995), Tools for Innovators: Creative Strategies for Managing Public Sector Organizations (1998), and numerous articles on public management innovation, public ethics, and environmental management. Cohen has taught courses in public management, policy analysis, environmental policy, and management innovation.

Peter B. deMenocal
Associate Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences. DeMenocol studies marine sediment to reconstruct past changes in ocean circulation and terrestrial climate, primarily using stable isotopic and trace metal (Mg/Ca) analyses of foraminifera and terrigenous sediment geochemistry to investigate how and why climates have changed in the past. Recent research projects include: Holocene climate and ocean circulation variability, Tropical-extratropical paleoclimate linkages, Pliocene-Pleistocene evolution of tropical climates, African Climate and Human EvolutiondeMenocol earned a B.S. in Geology from St. Lawrence University, 1982, an M.S. in Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of Oceanography in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Geology, Columbia University, 1991.

Dana R. Fisher
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology. Fisher’s research interests fall under the subdisciplines of environmental and political sociology. Presently, she is working on projects that explore the ways that civil society participates in political processes—on the local, national, and international levels. One project concerns studying citizens’ involvement in globalization protests around the world. Another analyzes young people’s levels of civic engagement when they work for environmental organizations in the United States. A third is looking at the role of civil society within multilateral governance regimes.

Anthony Del Genio
Adjunct Professor, Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Del Genio investigates long-term global climate change—how the terrestrial climate system will respond to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases over the next few decades. He studies clouds and convection, one of the biggest uncertainties in climate research today. His goal is to anticipate how changes in cloud cover, height, and optical thickness, and associated changes in water vapor, will perturb the radiative balance and either enhance or mitigate the warming resulting from greenhouse gases.

Lisa Goddard
Research Scientist, Forecasting and Prediction Research, IRI. Dr. Goddard’s affiliation with the IRI began in 1995, after receiving her Ph.D. in atmospheric and oceanic sciences from Princeton University. Dr. Goddard's research focuses on developing methodologies used to produce climate forecast information from seasonal to multi-decadal timescales. She is part of a team that studies climate dynamics and potential predictability; assesses climate prediction tools; advances strategies for research, development, and implementation of climate forecasts; and produces the seasonal Net Assessment forecasts for the IRI. She has developed tools and analysis methods used for examining and comparing the data from the general circulation models used for climate forecasting. Her research mainly focuses on climate dynamics and climate predictability, with a continuing interest in El Niño and an increasing interest in climate change and decadal variability.

Upmanu Lall
Professor, Department of Earth and Environ-mental Engineering; Senior Research Scientist, IRI. Lall’s research interests include hydro-climate modeling; spatial data analysis and visualization; time series analysis and forecasting; Bayes networks for process modeling and decision making; risk and reliability; and water resource management using climate information.

Douglas Martinson
Senior Research Scientist, Climate Modeling and Diagnostics Group, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Martinson is coauthor of Martinson and Steele: “Future of Arctic Sea Ice Cover: Implications of an Antarctic Analog.”

Vijay Modi
Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University. (Ph.D. Cornell 1984, postdoctoral work MIT 1984–1986). His expertise is in the field of: energy sources and conversion, heat/mass transfer, and fluid mechanics. His current areas of research interest are related to: energy infrastructure, CO2 sequestration (with Prof. Lackner in Earth and Environmental Engineering), fuel cells, distributed sensing/control of flow, and heat transfer.

John Mutter

Professor, Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and of International and Public Affairs. Mutter teaches undergraduates about such complex, dynamic Earth systems as earthquakes and climate variations. His graduate students in marine seismology learn how seismic energy is used to understand the Earth’s interior; he also coordinates the natural science component of the Ph.D. in sustainable development. Mutter has two main areas of research. The first is global tectonics using geophysical techniques. He has conducted more than 30 research cruises in all parts of the world including the Arctic and Antarctic, and has authored or co-authored more than 70 articles in scientific journals, as well as many popular publications. He is currently an editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research. Mutter’s second area of research is the relationship between natural systems and human well-being with particular focus on the vulnerability of poor societies to natural variations and extreme conditions. Most recently these studies included examination of Katrina’s impact and that of the 2004 tsunami. He received a B.S. in physics and pure mathematics from the University of Melbourne, Australia, an M.S. in geophysics from the University of Sydney, Australia, and a Ph.D. in marine geophysics from Columbia University.

Dorothy Peteet
Adjunct Senior Research Scientist, NASA/ Goddard Institute for Space Studies/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Peteet is a Quaternary paleoecologist and paleoclimatologist. Her expertise is palynology and macrofossil investigations, which are used to reconstruct vegetational and climatic history. Her research is focused in the eastern United States as well as the arctic and subarctic (Alaska and Siberia). Rates of tree migration, wetland carbon histories, and rapid climate change are special topics of research. She utilizes general circulation modeling (GCM) to perform climate sensitivity tests in order to better understand mechanisms and causes of climatic change.

David Rind
Dr. David Rind is a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976, and has been working with NASA since 1978. He has published more than 200 papers in the fields of climate modeling, paleoclimate studies, and atmospheric dynamics. He's received NASA awards for Special and Superior Achievement, been on various NRC and AMS panels, and was an AGU Charney Lecturer. His particular emphasis has been on the potential for climate change associated with increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases, and its associated impacts. He has also been working on evaluating the importance of other forcing factors, such as varying solar radiation.

Cynthia Rosenzweig
Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Research Scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she is the leader of the Climate Impacts Group. She is an Adjunct Senior Research Scientist at the Columbia University Earth Institute and an Adjunct Professor at Barnard College. A Fellow of the American Society of Agronomy, Dr. Rosenzweig’s research focuses on climate variability and change in relation to agriculture, at regional, national, and global scales. She has organized and led interdisciplinary national and international studies in this field, and published over 100 scientific articles and reports. She has developed methods for using remote sensing to identify agricultural areas in the U.S. Corn Belt sensitive to the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon, and analyzed how climate affects crop production, plant diseases and pests, and soils. Dr. Rosenzweig is a recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Christopher Small
Associate Research Scientist, Marine Geology and Geophysics, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Small’s research interests include urban remote sensing; the marine gravity field; continental physiography, climate, and human population; hypsographic demography; global volcanism and human population; and urban vegetation.

Shiv Someshwar
Dr. Shiv Someshwar is a member of the research faculty at Columbia University, New York. He is also Director for Institutions and Policy Systems research, and Director Asia and Pacific Regional Program at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society of the Earth Institute. Dr. Someshwar was field-based in Asia (Bangalore, India) from July 2006 to Sept. 2008. He is leading a number of international efforts to help create institutional arrangements to promote climate risk management in many sectors such as food security, water resources, fire and urban disasters, and for the design of policies for scaling up climate risk management for adaptation to climate change.

Awash Teklehaimanot
Awash Teklehaimanot is a senior staff member of the World Health Organization (WHO/Geneva) and is seconded to Columbia University to work with Jeff Sachs at Columbia’s Center for Global Health and Economic Development and at the Earth Institute He is the Director of the Malaria Programme at Columbia and is a member of the Task Force on Malaria for the UN Millennium Project. He has also a faculty position at the Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health and is currently teaching the Epidemiology of Malaria to graduate and post-graduate students. Awash provides technical support to malaria-endemic countries by aiding in the preparation of proposals to the Global Fund and in capacity building for project implementation. He also coordinates a number of WHO-funded research activities in Africa.

Before coming to Columbia, Awash worked with Jeff Sachs at Harvard’s Center for International Development. His work at WHO included extensive leadership in the development of the global Roll Back Malaria program. In addition, Awash spent several years as the director of Ethiopia’s national malaria control program. Awash received BSc in biology and chemistry from Addis Ababa, University, Ethiopia; MSc in Environmental Health from Bowling Green State University, Ohio; an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and a PhD in medical entomology from Purdue University.

Mingfang Ting
Mingfang Ting is Associate Director, M.A. Program in Climate and Society and Doherty Senior Research Scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Dr. Ting joined Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in August 2003 from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked for ten years as Assistant and Associate Professor. She has taught many undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Illinois, ranging from introduction to meteorology to advanced atmospheric dynamics. Dr. Ting's main research interests include the impact of global climate change on regional scales and teleconnection dynamics, modeling and diagnostics of the climatological and anomalous stationary waves and the impact of sea surface temperatures on global climate, as well as the dynamics of the droughts and floods circulation due to both natural and anthropogenic causes. She received her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University in 1990.

M. Neil Ward
Director, Decision Systems Research. Ward joined the IRI in April of 2000 from the University of Oklahoma, where he was principal investigator for a range of climate research topics. Ward also has extensive experience in operational forecast products and systems from his previous tenure with centers in Europe. He focuses on the important link between forecast products and user applications. In this role, he works in the field with collaborators to better understand requirements, and also with the climate program at the IRI, to ensure the feedback users provide becomes incorporated, whenever possible, into improved forecast developments. His research considers the scales which useful climate information can be provided, both temporally and spatially. Since the early 1990s, he has been a pioneer in sharing knowledge on current climate science for the purpose of its better utilization, both amongst climate professionals in developing countries and amongst students and professionals more generally in climate and climate-impacted sectors such as agriculture and water resources management.