Research collaborators

Collaboration between the Degrees-funded research teams and experienced SRM scientists and scholars, is a crucial part of Degrees’ capacity-building process. While Degrees-funded scientists are experts in their own fields, few have worked on solar radiation modification (SRM) before. Each team is therefore paired up with at least one SRM expert, and they work together both in person and remotely over the duration of the project. Research collaborators volunteer their time and the relationship is intended to be mutually beneficial to both the collaborators and the Degrees-funded researchers.

Prof. Babatunde Abiodun

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Babatunde Abiodun is Lecturer and Coordinator of the Atmospheric Science Programme for the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He is also an adjunct Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (USA). Prior to joining UCT in 2008, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University (USA), and a lecturer at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (Nigeria). His research interest lies in the development and application of atmospheric modelling, and during his time at Iowa State University, he led the development of a global atmospheric model with grid adaptation. Babatunde Abiodun has co-authored three book chapters, published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in high-profile international journals, and served as Lead Author in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2013: The Physical Science Basis. He has received funding from agencies such as the global change SysTem for Analysis Research and Training (START), the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Southern Africa Water Research Commission (WRC). The funding is to enable him to focus on the development and application of climate models to improve knowledge on regionally-extensive droughts over Africa, extreme weather and climate events, and the impacts of reforestation activities on regional climates. He is an editor for the journal Progress in Earth and Planetary Science, and is a former member of the Council of the Society of South African Geographers (SSAG).

Prof. Govindasamy Bala

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Govindasamy Bala is based at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). His main research interests are modelling climate change, carbon and water cycles, solar geoengineering, and the global and regional monsoon systems. He has published over 110 peer-reviewed papers on climate change, carbon cycles and monsoons. Prof. Bala was the recipient of the 2008 Scopus Young Scientist Award for Earth Sciences, and together with collaborators from China and the USA, also won the prestigious World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Norbert Gerbier MUMM International Award for 2014, for a research paper on fast climate system adjustments. Prof. Bala has served as a Lead and Contributing Author in the AR5 and AR6 IPCC WG1 reports.

Prof. Inés Angela Camilloni

University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Inés Camilloni is a Full Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the School of Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and an Independent Researcher of the Argentina National Research Council (CONICET), Argentina. She is currently member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research and of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology of UNESCO. She has a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on climate variability and change in South America, acting on the following subjects: climate scenarios, climate change impacts, cities and climate change. She has authored several peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, book chapters and books. She has participated in or coordinated many research projects related to these subjects. She has been Lead Author of the IPCC AR5-WG1 and SR15 reports and Review Editor of the IPCC AR6-WG1.

Dr Pete Irvine

University College London

Dr Pete Irvine is Lecturer at UCL Earth Sciences, and previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences working in Prof. David Keith’s group. Dr Irvine conducts research on the climate and broader impacts of solar geoengineering and works to put those findings into perspective with the risks posed by climate change. Dr Irvine was awarded his PhD on the climate response to solar geoengineering in 2012 and worked after this as a post-doc at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam. In recent work, Dr Irvine has worked on novel analyses for evaluating solar geoengineering’s performance at offsetting climate change, and is currently working to evaluate the effects of solar geoengineering on drought and aridity. Beyond this, Dr Irvine has published on the sea-level rise response to solar geoengineering, produced reviews of its climate impacts, and collaborated to produce several interdisciplinary pieces addressing the broader socio-political implications of solar geoengineering.

Dr Khalil Karami

University of Leipzig, Germany

Dr Khalil Karami completed his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany where his main focus was on the middle atmospheric physics and dynamics and the top-down coupling of the middle atmosphere to the troposphere. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Leipzig. He is particularly interested in the role of atmospheric waves – from their generation to their propagation and their breaking – in the large-scale dynamics and circulation of the atmosphere.

Prof. Ben Kravitz

Indiana University

Ben Kravitz is an internationally recognized scientist in climate modelling studies of geoengineering and large perturbations to the climate system. He is the co-founder of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), a collaboration between climate modelling centers throughout the world to better understand the expected climate effects of various geoengineering scenarios. Results from GeoMIP have been featured in the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which Ben served as a contributing author, and multiple reports on geoengineering from the U.S. National Academies. He has received an Early Career Scientist Award from the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics and the Ronald L. Brodzinski Award for Early Career Exceptional Achievement from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He has been invited to speak on a variety of climate science topics domestically and internationally, including at the US National Academy of Sciences on the national security implications of climate change and on geoengineering. Ben is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Indiana University. His activities include using engineering techniques in climate models to better understand climate feedbacks, studying teleconnections in the climate system, and developing climate model emulators for use in Integrated Assessment Models.

Dr Chris Lennard

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Chris is a climate scientist at the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) whose interests include the co-development of regional climate information, regional climate modelling, renewable energy, extreme climate events, capacitating African climate scientists for climate science, and mountain biking and trail running. He is involved in a number of projects including as Co-PI on the Wind Atlas for South Africa (WASA) project, Co-PI on Health:RADAR to co-develop an open-source web-based platform for climate sensitive infectious disease modelling, and FOCUS-Africa to develop tailored climate services over Southern Africa. He has authored or co-authored over 60 papers and 5 book chapters including as a Lead Author in the IPCC Special Report on Land and Climate, and the Africa chapters of the IPCC AR5 and AR6. He serves as co-chair of the WCRP Academy, whose role is to develop capacity for climate research, particularly in developing countries and facilitates the CORDEX-Africa initiative that capacitates African climate scientists and builds our understanding of how climate change may impact Africa. He serves on the WCRP Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project steering committee and the Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board. He is dad to two young boys, aged 7 and 9, who inspire his research.

Dr Doug McMartin

Cornell University & California Institute of Technology

Douglas MacMartin is a Senior Research Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on climate engineering (also known as solar geoengineering or climate intervention) with the aim of helping to develop the knowledge base necessary to support informed future societal decisions in this challenging and controversial field. He has published extensively on the subject, and in addition to public and academic presentations has provided briefings to the UN Environment Program and testimony to the US Congress, and was a member of the US National Academies panel that made recommendations on both research and governance in March 2021. He received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1992;previous positions include United Technologies Research Center (1994-2000) and the California Institute of Technology (2000-2015). His research is funded by NSF and by the Cornell Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

Prof. John Moore

Beijing Normal University & University of Lapland, Finland

John Moore, British, is the Chief Scientist of GCESS at Beijing Normal University and a Research Professor at University of Lapland, Finland. He is also a Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, and a Guest Professor at the Polar Research Institute of China. Awarded the China Friendship medal 2014, he was also a China “1000 talent” awardee in 2010. John was Chief Scientist on the 2007-2009 Kinnvika International Polar Year project, member of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Advisory Panel on Geoengineering, Steering Committee member of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP), Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), Finnish representative on the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) Glaciology Network. He has been a member/leader of 6 Antarctic, 4 Greenland and 20 Svalbard expeditions. As a PhD student, he developed the Dielectric Profiling (DEP) method for rapid analysis of ice cores – now a standard technique for ice coring. One of Finland’s first joint university professors at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, and also with Thule Institute, University of Oulu. John was selected by NASA to help design the orbiting radar for the Jovian moon Europa, and is also one of the first non-Chinese born leaders of a major research program in China – the Chinese geoengineering research program. His research activities focus on geoengineering, sea level change, and ice sheet dynamics. He has authored 200 SCI articles (~19,000 citations, H-index=59, 19 articles published in PNAS & the “Nature” group). Editor of PNAS.

Dr Helene Muri

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Helene Muri is a research professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and holds a D.Phil (PhD) in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Oxford from 2009. After a post-doc at Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, on ERC Advanced Grant on paleo-monsoons in East Asia, Muri has been working as a researcher in Norway at the University of Oslo on climate geoengineering. Her research has been focussed on Earth system modelling of solar radiation management techniques, contributing to the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) with simulations with the NorESM model. She also serves on the steering committee of GeoMIP and Carbon Dioxide Removal Model Intercomparison Project (CDR-MIP). She has contributed to the reports of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Groups 1 and 3. She was the leader on projects “Exploring the potential and side-effects of climate engineering (EXPECT)” and “Potential of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage to limit warming to 1.5°C”, and has more than 60 scientific publications. Muri has been working on the modelling of multiple climate geoengineering techniques, including solar dimming, stratospheric aerosol injections, marine cloud brightening and cirrus cloud thinning, and the interpretation of the climate responses to these over the past decade.

Prof. Alan Robock

Rutgers University

Alan Robock is a Distinguished Professor of climate science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970 with a B.A. in Meteorology, and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an S.M. in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1977, both in Meteorology. Before graduate school, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines. He was a professor at the University of Maryland, 1977-1997, and the State Climatologist of Maryland, 1991-1997, before coming to Rutgers in 1998. Prof. Robock has published more than 460 articles on his research in the area of climate change, including more than 280 peer-reviewed papers. His areas of expertise include climate intervention (also called geoengineering), climatic effects of nuclear war, effects of volcanic eruptions on climate, and soil moisture. Along with Ben Kravitz, he founded the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, which has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles in the past decade and continues to support standardized model simulations and annual workshops. Prof. Robock serves as Associate Editor of Reviews of Geophysics, the most highly-cited journal in the Earth Sciences. His honors include being a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the AMS Jule Charney Medal. Prof. Robock was a Lead Author of the recent Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007). For more information, visit http://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/

Dr Simone Tilmes

National Center for Atmospheric Research

Dr Simone Tilmes is a Project Scientist III at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the co-chair for the Community Earth System Model (CESM) chemistry-climate working group. Her scientific interests cover the understanding and evaluation of chemical, aerosol and dynamical processes in chemistry-climate models. She has investigated past, present and future evolutions of the ozone hole in both hemispheres based on models and observations. Further research includes interactions in tropospheric chemistry, aerosols, air quality, long-range transport of pollutants, and tropospheric ozone. She is also studying the impact of climate interventions on the Earth’s climate system, the hydrological cycle, sea-ice, and the impact of solar radiation management on dynamics and chemistry in both the troposphere and the stratosphere. Together with a team of scientists, she produced the first stratospheric aerosol geoengineering large ensemble (GLENS) using the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM), as well as similar simulations with WACCM6, which has been made available to the community in order to investigate the benefits, side effects and risks of stratospheric aerosol interventions.

Dr Mari Tye

National Center for Atmospheric Research

Mari Tye is a Project Scientist in the Climate Change Research group of the Climate and Global Dynamics Lab at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Her research centers on extreme weather and climate phenomena and their anticipated evolution with climate change. Mari’s two main foci are understanding the likely societal consequences of climate interventions (e.g. through changes in drought regimes), and translating global circulation model output into useful information for water resource managers. Through her background as a Professional Civil Engineer, Mari facilitates collaborations between ground-breaking atmospheric science research and decision-makers. In this capacity she is the current Chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate. Mari joined NCAR in 2012 after completing her PhD in statistical climatology at Newcastle University, UK, in 2012. Prior to this, Mari worked as a Civil Engineer in flood prevention and mitigation focussing on resilient drainage solutions for surface water flooding. She also worked in Uganda reviewing water and sanitation in and around Kabbubu Village and helping to develop “low regret” solutions to improve the facilities and water supplies.

Dr Daniele Visioni

Cornell University

Daniele Visioni is a climate modeler, and currently a Research Associate at Cornell University. He’s also currently the co-chair of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). He received is PhD in Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry from the University of L’Aquila, in Italy. His main area of research is the evolution and behavior of stratospheric sulfate aerosols and their impacts on clouds, stratospheric composition and surface climate. His current work with Earth System Models aims to understand the impacts of geoengineering as a function of different possible decisions, strategies and scenarios, to inform policymakers on the potential and limitations of geoengineering. He as also worked as part of the Climate Chemistry Model Intercomparison (CCMI) project to understand the future evolution of stratospheric ozone, and to understand the climate response to explosive volcanic eruptions.

Dr Lili Xia

Rutgers University

Dr Lili Xia is a Research Associate at Rutgers University working with Dr Alan Robock. She graduated in 2014 with a PhD from the Atmospheric Sciences Graduate Program at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. She has been working on simulating sulphate injection geoengineering using climate models and focusing on estimating climate change impacts on agriculture, ecosystem, and air pollutants (e.g. surface ozone) under geoengineering. She actively collaborates with the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) and the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), to introduce geoengineering to the crop modelling community as one of the future climate scenarios. She is also interested in the interaction between land and the atmosphere through the biosphere. Another project Dr Xia is working on is to evaluate global agriculture impacts from a simulated regional nuclear conflict. She has published 11 peer-reviewed papers and 2 book chapters on her research.

Research collaborators

Prof. Babatunde Abiodun

Prof. Govindasamy Bala

Prof. Inés Angela Camilloni​

Dr Pete Irvine

Dr Khalil Karami

Prof. Ben Kravitz

Dr Chris Lennard

Dr Doug McMartin

Prof. John Moore

Dr Helene Muri

Prof. Alan Robock

Rutgers University

Dr Simone Tilmes

Dr Mari Tye

Dr Daniele Visioni

Dr Lili Xia

Prof. Inés Angela Camilloni