INSPIRE Community

  Nicole Davi (she/her) is an Adjunct Senior Research Scientist at the LDEO Tree-Ring Laboratory.  She is also a Professor and the Chairperson of the Environmental Science Department at William Paterson University. Davi is a paleoclimate scientist focused on the development and interpretation of tree-ring records and has a background in physical geography. Her research focuses on understanding climate variability, dynamics and forcing on time scales ranging from years to millennia, as well as understanding the impacts of climate variability on ecosystems and people. Davi has developed tree-ring records that have documented the history of late Holocene drought across Central Asia as well as warming across the northern latitudes, particularly in the circum-Arctic. Currently, she is building a field program focused on Northeast coastal forests with the aim of reconstructing tropical cyclone frequency and severity recorded in these unique maritime forests.   

 Bärbel Hönisch (she/her) is a Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (DEES) and a researcher at LDEO.  She is interested in the effect of global carbon cycle perturbations on climate and the oceans, in particular past variations of seawater acidity and its relation to atmospheric CO2. As she was originally trained as a marine biologist, her research includes culture experiments with living marine calcifiers to validate proxies for past environmental conditions. Over the past 7 years she has led a consortium of paleo-CO2 proxy experts to compile, vet and modernize published paleo-CO2 estimates over the Cenozoic.  

 Sarah Hurley (she/her) is a Lamont Assistant Research Professor in marine biogeochemistry, with a focus on organic geochemistry and microbial physiology. Her work uses biosignatures preserved in the geologic record to track evolutionary innovations in the biosphere through time. Currently, her group is focused on understanding carbon fixation by phytoplankton in future oceans. Sarah is a co-founder of the Geoscience Education and Mentorship Support (GEMS) program, which is a national program matching students interested in pursuing degrees in the Earth sciences with field-specific mentors. Sarah holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

  Christine McCarthy (she/her) is a Lamont Associate Research Professor. She received her Masters and Ph.D. from Brown University, after which she conducted a two-year postdoc fellowship in Tokyo. She specializes in running laboratory experiments that explore how ice and other geologic materials respond to external forcing. In particular she is interested in how features at the microscopic scale affect macroscopic-scale behavior, such as how glaciers flow, how icy moons are heated by tidal energy, or how seismic waves are damped as they travel through the earth.  

 Richard Seager is the Palisades Geophysical Institute Lamont Research Professor.  Using climate models, instrumental records and proxy reconstructions, and working across the world, he has studied the causes of droughts, floods and pluvials in recent decades and throughout the past millennium, the physical processes that couple the atmosphere to the ocean and land surface and the impact of agricultural practices on climate.  Throughout his career Professor Seager has studied how ocean processes, particularly in the tropics, control the climate over the Earth’s continents and its variability on seasonal to millennial timescales.   His current work focuses on changes in the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere system and how this impacts climate worldwide and, relatedly, how global hydroclimate will change in the near-term future as a consequence of rising greenhouse gases. Professor Seager has a special focus on semi-arid regions such as southwest North America, the world’s Mediterranean-type climates, the Middle East and East Africa, and the implications for people and ecosystems.  

 A Lamont Associate Research Professor, Dr. Westervelt (he/him) is an affiliate faculty member of the Columbia University Data Science Institute, an affiliated scientist with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, an air pollution advisor to the U.S. State Department, and a Columbia University Climate and Life Fellow. His current research spans from air quality and climate modeling to deployment and calibration of low cost sensors for air quality. He previously worked as an Associate Research Scientist at LDEO, and as a Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He completed his PhD degree in May 2013 in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.  

Dr. Suzana Camargo is currently the Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professor at LDEO. She will be start at a new position as Professor of Climate at the Columbia Climate School in January 2025. Dr. Camargo has been working at Columbia University since 1999. She is originally from Brazil, where she studied Physics at the University of São Paulo. She received a PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. She is an expert on extreme events, in particular tropical cyclones and their relationship with climate on various time-scales. In 2020 she received the AMS Distinguished Scientific Technological Accomplishment Award, from the STAC Committee on Climate Variability and Change and was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2023. 

Dr. Andrew Juhl is a Lamont Research Professor studying Biological Oceanography and Aquatic Microbiology.  His research has focused on studying the growth and physiology of planktonic microorganisms in coastal marine systems, estuaries, rivers, and lakes, and is motivated by both basic and applied research questions. His research approach links laboratory experiments with small-scale field manipulations and field observations, connecting cell biology and physiology with ecology, and to the physics and chemistry of aquatic environments.