Jillian Durkin

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Research Assistant, RDCEP

MPP Candidate, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

MBA Candidate, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Jillian Durkin is a second year M.P.P./M.B.A. student at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy and Booth School of Business. Her research interests are in environmental and energy policy issues in developing countries. She has previously earned a B.A. in Economics and International Studies at Northwestern University.

At RDCEP, Jillian is involved in Chicago Climate Online, which seeks to become a preeminent policy resource for researchers. C2O is designed to serve a broad audience including such groups as undergraduate and graduate students conducting research for a thesis, journalists, and staff members for policymakers.

Matz Haugen

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Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Statistics

University of Chicago

I currently do research on extreme event characterization, modeling and forecasting using geological data like climate models and observations. For example, are days of extreme temperatures getting more frequent? Or is the annual temperature profile more variable with the current post-industrial climate forcings compared to the pre-industrial era? To answer these questions I look at climate model output, e.g. Global Circulation Models, using different starting conditions and see how their behavior changes statistically.

Related to this is also the desire to incorporate a more statistical framework with the current deterministic climate models. This involves for example adaptive grid sizes and time steps dependent on desired spatio-temporal resolution.

Whitney Huang

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Graduate Student, Department of Statistics at Purdue University

Whitney Huang is a fouth year PhD Student in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University.  He is working on Spatial Extremes and Spatio-Temporal Statistics under Prof. Hao Zhang. He received his Bachelors degree in Mechanical engineering from  National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan and his Master degree in Statistics from University of Akron, Ohio.

Chen Chen

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Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago

Chen received her PhD in Climatology from the department of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, and is currently involved at the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at Computation Institute, as well as the research network of statistical methods for atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

Her research interests include climate variabilities and impacts, climate change sensitivity, modeling and diagnostics, predictability and forecast, geophysical fluid dynamics (rotating horizontal convection).
 

Jeremy Klavans

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MSESP Candidate, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

Jeremy Klavans is a first year M.S. in Environmental Science and Policy candidate at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests include climate, energy and environmental policy. Jeremy holds a B.A. in Environmental Science & Policy and Political Science from the University of Miami.

Katrina Lewis

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MPP Candidate, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

Katrina Lewis is an M.P.P candidate at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Her main area of interest is energy economics and policy. Katrina holds a B.A. in Organizational Studies and French from the University of Michigan and a certificate of political studies from the Institut d'études politiques.

Karen Krieb

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Masters Student, DePaul University

 

 

 

Karen Krieb is a graduate student in the Computer Science MS program at DePaul University. She has worked as an environmental consultant with a focus on industrial water issues and currently works as a data scientist. She received a BA in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University with thesis work on soil nutrients and reforestation in Pedasí, Panama. 

Jiali Wang

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Postdoctoral appointee, Climate & Atmospheric Science Department, Argonne National Laboratory

 

 

 

Jiali received her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2012.

Her capabilities include: downscaling of climate models to regional and local scales; big data analysis; regional modeling of atmospheric physics and extreme climate/weather events; evaluation of model performance by applying statistical technologies; assessment of urban climate impacts.

Ricardo B. Lourenço

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Graduate Student, University of Chicago

Ricardo Barros Lourenço is a CS Ph.D. Student at the University of Chicago. He holds an MSc. in Predictive Analytics at DePaul University, also awarded a scholarship of Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (“Ciência sem Fronteiras”) from CAPES Foundation / Brazilian Ministry of Education. He received a BA in Image and Sound from the Federal University of São Carlos. While a student of Geology at State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), has worked with Airborne Geophysics and Seismic Data Processing.

He is a Research Assistant at the Computation Institute (a joint-venture from University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory) working with the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP) and Globus Labs teams.

He is interested in problems comprehending large-scale geospatial data acquisition, integration, and processing, involving machine learning and computer vision methods implemented in High-Performance Computing facilities.

Research Interests:

  • Machine learning
  • Distributed remote sensing

Current Projects:

ATLAS

Delphine Deryng

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Postdoctoral Scholar, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Adjunct Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies & Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research

 

Areas of Expertise:

  • Agricultural systems and climate change
  • Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability
  • The water-energy-food nexus
  • Modeling uncertainty and robust decision making

Delphine Deryng's research deals with global environmental change issues with a particular interest in agricultural systems and implications for food security. She develops and uses process-based crop modeling tools to explore the interaction between climate, crops and land use decision. She conducts multiple research activities as part of the AgMIP Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI) initiative exploring the role of extreme weather events on global crop yield and better understanding the effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations on crop water productivity. In addition, she currently leads the first Regional Gridded Crop Modeling Activity (RGCMA) to assess the potential impacts of irrigated crop production on ground water resources in India under climate change using an ensemble of gridded models and regional climate and agricultural datasets.

Prior joining RDCEP, Delphine worked on southern Africa’s hydro-economy and water security as a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (2014-2015).

Delphine holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia (2014) and a Masters in Geography from McGill University (2009). She joined the Computation Institute in November 2015.

Research Projects

AgGRID | InterSectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (ISI-MIP) | The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) | The Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison

Selected Publications

  • Deryng D, Elliott J et al. (in review, submitted to Nature Climate Change) “Regional disparities in the beneficial effects of rising CO2 emissions on crop water productivity”
  • Conway D, Archer E, Deryng D et al. (2015) “Climate and Southern Africa’s water-energy-food nexus”, Nature Climate Change 5, 837–846 (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2735
  • Deryng D (2014) “Climate change impacts on crop productivity in global semi-arid areas and selected semi-arid economies”, working paper, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), London
  • Deryng D, Conway D, Ramankutty N et al. (2014) “Global crop yield response to extreme heat stress under multiple climate change futures”, Environmental Research Letters, 9, 034011, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/9/3/034011
  • Rosenzweig C, Elliott J, Deryng D et al. (2014) “Assessing agricultural risks of climate change in the 21st century in a global gridded crop model intercomparison”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3268–3273. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222463110
  • Elliott J, Deryng D et al. (2014) “Constraints and potentials of future irrigation water availability on agricultural production under climate change”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3239–3244. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222474110
  • Deryng D, Sacks, WJ, Barford CC, and Ramankutty N (2011) “Simulating the effects of climate and land management practices on global crop yield”, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 25(2), doi:10.1029/2009GB003765