I am an associate professor at the Department of Geophysical Sciences and Committee of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Before joining UChicago, I was a tenured associate professor at Rice University. I received my Ph.D. (geophysical turbulence) and M.A. (applied mathematics) from UC Berkeley in 2013 and was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2013 to 2016. I received a CAREER Award from NSF in 2021 and a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2020.

I lead the Climate Extremes Theory and Data (CeTD) group focused on integrating theory, simulations, observations, and machine learning techniques to understand the dynamics and future changes of extreme weather events in a changing climate.

Dr. Jiwen Fan is the Deputy Division Director and Senor Earth Scientist of the Environmental Science Division. She also holds a joint appointment as a senior scientist at University of Chicago. She is a Fellow of American Meteorological Society (AMS).

Dr. Fan’s research encompasses atmospheric chemistry and aerosols, cloud physics, convective systems, severe weather, aerosol-precipitation-climate interactions, land-atmosphere interactions, and human-earth system interactions. Her primary foci in recent years include the impacts of environmental (e.g., urbanization, anthropogenic aerosols, wildfires) and climate change on convective storms and weather hazards and model developments of cloud microphysics and aerosol-cloud interactions.

Pertaining to AICE, she has been working with data scientists to develop machine learning models for predicting precipitation and hail, analyzing observational data, and building ML emulators for complex cloud microphysical processes.

Ian Foster is a computer scientist with a predilection for building software systems (and, more recently, for deploying services) that solve problems in the sciences. He likes to think that he is part of a movement that is re-inventing scholarship and education in an era of massive and pervasive computation–much as happened after the dawn of printing (1450) and the calculus (1687).

He is a Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Professor at the University of Chicago–two wonderful institutions where science and scholarship are cherished, and the importance of new forms of instrumentation as enablers of discovery is appreciated. He is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, and Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University and Argonne.

His research group, Globus Labs, engages talented students, postdocs, and staff in the challenge of making all research data accessible, discoverable, and usable. There they closely with Globus, which builds and operates cloud data services for the research community.

Amir Jina is an Assistant Professor at Harris Public Policy. Amir’s research focuses on the role of the environment in shaping how societies develop. This research combines economics with methods from climate science and remote sensing to understand the impacts of climate, and has involved fieldwork on climate change adaptation with communities in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Uganda.

Amir is a founding member of the Climate Impact Lab – researching the socioeconomic impacts of climate change around the world – and scientific advisor to the Innovation Commission on Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture – promoting the use of weather services for climate change adaptation in low-income countries

Amir received a Ph.D. in Sustainable Development and M.A. in Climate and Society both from Columbia University, B.A.s in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, and previously worked with the Red Cross/Red Crescent in South Asia.

Prof. Shaw’s research focuses on the physics of the atmosphere and climate system past, present and future. She seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms controlling the response to climate changes so that we can have greater confidence in future projections. Her approach combines theory (primarily conservation laws), numerical modeling across a hierarchy of complexity and observational data analysis. Prof. Shaw is excited to take advantage of AI/ML tools for increasing our understanding and prediction of the impacts of climate change. She is working to ensure these methods get the right answer for the right reasons.

Robert Rosner is a theoretical physicist, on the faculty of the University of Chicago since 1987, where he is the William E. Wrather Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics, as well as in the Enrico Fermi Institute and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He served as Argonne National Laboratory’s Chief Scientist and Associate Laboratory Director for Physical, Biological and Computational Sciences (2002–2005), and was Argonne’s Laboratory Director from 2005 to 2009; he was the founding chair of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory Directors’ Council (2007–2009). His degrees are all in physics (BA, Brandeis University; PhD, Harvard University). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (as a Foreign Member) in 2004; he is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Most of his scientific work has been related to fluid dynamics and plasma physics problems, as well as in applied mathematics and computational physics, especially in the development of modern high-performance computer simulation tools, with a particular interest in complex systems (ranging from astrophysical systems to nuclear fission reactors). Within the past few years, he has been increasingly involved in energy technologies, and in the public policy issues that relate to the development and deployment of various energy production and consumption technologies, including especially nuclear energy, the electrification of transport, and energy use in urban environments. He is the founding director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), located at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and Booth School of Business.

Rick Stevens is the Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory, and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, with significant responsibility in delivering on the U.S. national initiative for Exascale computing and developing the DOE initiative in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Science.

At Argonne, he is leading the Laboratory’s AI for Science initiative and currently focusing on high-performance computing systems which includes leading a significant collaboration with Intel and Cray to launch Argonne’s first exascale computer, Aurora 21, which will pursue some of the farthest-reaching science and engineering breakthroughs ever achieved with supercomputing, as well as a partnership with Cerebras Systems to bring hardware on site to advance the massive deep learning experiments being pursued at Argonne for basic and applied science and medicine with supercompute-scale AI.

Prof. Stevens is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received many national honors for his research, including an R&D 100 award.

Rebecca Willett is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005 and was an Assistant then tenured Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University from 2005 to 2013. She was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Harvey D. Spangler Faculty Scholar, and Fellow of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013 to 2018.  Prof. Willett received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007, was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group 2007-2011, and received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010. Prof. Willett has also held visiting researcher positions at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA in 2004, the University of Wisconsin-Madison 2003-2005, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in 2003, and the Applied Science Research and Development Laboratory at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare) in 2002. Her research interests include network and imaging science with applications in medical imaging, wireless sensor networks, astronomy, and social networks. She is also an instructor for FEMMES (Females Excelling More in Math Engineering and Science; news article here) and a local exhibit leader for Sally Ride Festivals. She was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Rice University Presidential Scholarship, the Society of Women Engineers Caterpillar Scholarship, and the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship.

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