DR. JAMES HANSEN
Director
Dr. James Hansen, formerly Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions. He was trained in physics and astronomy in the space science program of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. His early research on the clouds of Venus helped identify their composition as sulfuric acid. Since the late 1970s, he has focused his research on Earth’s climate, especially human-made climate change. Dr. Hansen is best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and was designated by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of the 100 most influential people on Earth. He has received numerous awards including the Carl-Gustaf Rossby and Roger Revelle Research Medals, the Sophie Prize and the Blue Planet Prize. Dr. Hansen is recognized for speaking truth to power, for identifying ineffectual policies as greenwash, and for outlining actions that the public must take to protect the future of young people and other life on our planet.
Dr. Hansen's webpage
Dr. Hansen’s CV
Dr. Hansen’s Twitter
Dr. Hansen's Facebook page
E-mail: jeh1[at]columbia[dot]edu
DR. MAKIKO SATO
Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Makiko Sato has devoted her career to researching our global climate. Before joining Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, she spent the last few decades working closely with Dr. Hansen at NASA GISS after obtaining her PhD in physics. Her research interests include analyzing the computational results of climate modeling due to different climate forcings such as greenhouse gas increase, ozone depletion and stratospheric and tropospheric aerosol changes and analyzing global change data, especially atmospheric temperature. Dr. Sato analyzes and updates figures for critical climate diagnostics and feedback and climate forcings. All figures are available to the public on her website.
Dr. Sato's website
E-mail: mhs119[at]columbia[dot]edu
DR. PUSHKER A. KHARECHA
Deputy Director and Climate Scientist
Dr. Pushker Kharecha is a climate scientist who is fascinated by many aspects of Earth science and the Deputy Director of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions. His interests encompass a wide range of temporal and spatial scales and his primary motivation is conducting policy-relevant scientific research. Although his doctoral work related to astrobiology and the Earth’s primeval biosphere, when he joined NASA GISS and Columbia Earth Institute in 2005 he shifted his focus to human-caused climate change. His research focuses on the human dimensions of the global carbon cycle, including the impacts of fossil fuel use and land use on climate. He is particularly interested in analyzing empirical data on energy and land use and developing climate change mitigation scenarios. Dr. Kharecha has lead/co-authored multiple high-profile scientific papers and has served as a lead author on a major UNEP publication (Global Environment Outlook-5). He has also participated in numerous education, public, and media outreach activities.
Click here or here for Dr. Kharecha's scholarly publications
E-mail: pak2111[at]columbia[dot]edu
Eunbi Jeong
Climate Communications Consultant
Eunbi currently serves as a Climate Communications Consultant at Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, Inc. Collaborating closely with Dr. James Hansen, Eunbi manages multifaceted advocacy, research, and public outreach projects, forging strategic partnerships across diverse sectors, with a particular focus on academic, philanthropic, and media stakeholders. Before this role, Eunbi worked as a Program Coordinator for Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University, overseeing program administration from 2018 to 2020. Prior to that, she worked with the Financial Instruments Sectors Team at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society, developing index insurance and index-based disaster risk management tools, and at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement as a Research Consultant devising a forecast-based financing model in Zambia. Eunbi holds a Master's degree in Climate and Society from Columbia University.
E-mail: csasinc.jeong[at]gmail[dot]com
Joe Kelly
Senior Research Staff Assistant
Joe got his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Montana and his master’s degree in atmospheric science from Colorado State University, where he focused on atmospheric radiation and cloud interactions with remote sensing applications for three-dimensional cloud field reconstruction techniques. He is now working at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University with research focusing on cloud feedbacks in the climate system.
E-mail: jdk2184[at]columbia[dot]edu
DR. CRAIG RYE
Post-doctoral Researcher (Now at GISS)
Dr. Craig Rye is a climate scientist with broad interests in decadal to century scale anthropogenic climate change. He is currently researching the response of the climate to accelerating polar ice melt over the next century. Craig has a PhD in Ocean Physics from the University of Southampton, where he studied the response of the Antarctic Subpolar Sea to ice melt and changes in wind forcing. Following his PhD, Craig researched economic instability and energy-economy models at the University of Surrey.
E-mail: craig.d.rye[at]gmail[dot]com