Assistant Professor
Family Medicine and Public Health
Climate, Atmospheric Science & Physical Oceanography

Tarik Benmarhnia is an associate professor in epidemiology with a joint appointment at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health. His work is combining epidemiological methods with environmental and econometric models with a specific focus on health policies and environmental justice. He currently conducts various projects in California and globally about the impacts of extreme weather events such as wildfires, heat waves and precipitation anomalies, and evaluates the effectiveness of population health and equity.

Distinguished Professor
Applied Ocean Sciences & Atmospheric Sciences

Dr. Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs (cholorofluorocarbons; belongs to family of halocarbons) in 1975 and showed that a ton each of CFC-11 and CFC-12 has more global warming effect than 10,000 tons of CO2. This discovery established the now accepted fact that non-CO2 gases are a major contributor to planet warming and also enabled the Montreal protocol to become the first successful climate mitigation policy. He led a NASA study with its climate satellite to show that clouds had a net cooling effect on the planet and quantified the radiation interactions with water vapor and its amplification of the CO2 warming. He led international field campaigns, developed unmanned aircraft platforms for tracking brown cloud pollution worldwide. His work has led to numerous policies including the formation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition by the United Nations. He was honored as the science advisor to Pope Francis' holy see delegation to the historic 2015 Paris Climate Summit and was named the UN Climate Champion in 2013. He has been elected to the US National Academy and the Royal Swedish Academy which awards the Nobel prizes, Foreign Policy named him a thought leader in 2014, and in 2018 he was named the Tang Laureat for sustainability science. 

Professor
Climate, Atmospheric Science & Physical Oceanography

Shang-Ping Xie's research centers on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their role in climate formation, variability, and change. The ocean's importance for climate is evident from the facts that most of solar radiation absorption occurs at the Earth's surface and that the ocean occupies seventy percent of the Earth's surface. His research contributes to answering such fundamental questions as what determines the spatial distributions of climate, why it varies in time, how preferred patterns of climate variability form, and how predictable climate is. 
He carries out both diagnostic and modeling studies, using observations and numerical models of the ocean, atmosphere, and their coupled system. Geographically, his work covers all three major oceans of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian, and monsoons of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. His research has led to the formulation of wind-evaporation-sea surface temperature (WES) feedback mechanism and the Indian Ocean capacitor effect, the "warmer-get-wetter" idea for rainfall change in global warming, and the discovery of what Science magazine called the longest island wake of the world. 

Professor
Geochemistry

Ralph Keeling is a Professor of Geochemistry in the Geosciences Research Division of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. His research focuses on atmospheric composition, the carbon cycle, and climate change. He is considered a leading investigator of the global oxygen cycle for his precise measurements and analysis techniques. Keeling developed his method for measuring atmospheric oxygen levels utilizing interferometry techniques in the laboratory. He began pioneering measurements of changes in atmospheric oxygen levels from air samples collected at stations around the world. The measurements continue at nine sampling stations, extending from Ellesmere Island in northern Canada over the equator to two Antarctic stations. He also continues the CO2 measurement program initiated by his father Charles D. Keeling. 

Professor
Biological Oceanography

Peter Franks is a professor of biological oceanography in the Integrative Oceanography Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. His research interests include red tides, phytoplankton ecology, and computer modeling of the interaction of physical and biological processes in the ocean. Franks studies recurrent red tides, particularly in the Gulf of Maine. Blooms of a toxic phytoplankton have been appearing each year in the region, forcing the closure of shellfish beds along the coasts of southern Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. After conducting extensive field studies and analyzing historical data, Franks determined that the toxic cells were transported along the coast in a freshwater plume originating from the Androscoggin and Kennebec rivers. He has developed computer models to understand the details of the transport mechanisms and to locate the source populations. His main interests lie in the study of physical/biological interactions in plankton. In one project, Franks studied how thin layers of phytoplankton form beneath the ocean surface. These microscopic patches of plant life are believed to provide a vital source of food for zooplankton, tiny animals that form a key link in the marine food chain.

Researcher and Professor
Climate, Atmospheric Science, and Physical Oceanography

Ian Eisenman is an associate professor of Climate, Atmospheric Sciences, and Physical Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. He received a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Physics from Williams College, a masters degree in Physics from UC Santa Barbara, a masters degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, and a PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University, followed by a postdoctoral appointment jointly at Caltech and University of Washington. His research focuses on climate dynamics, including sea ice, paleoclimate, icebergs, and the large-scale circulations of the ocean and atmosphere. He uses a variety of models ranging from idealized mathematical representations of climate phenomena that can be addressed with pencil and paper to comprehensive climate models that are run on supercomputers, also drawing on observations. A general theme of much his research is the use of physical modeling and mathematical methods to address questions related to societally relevant problems.

Email: ajmiller@ucsd.edu
Website: http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~miller/

Research Oceanographer and Senior Lecturer
Climate Sciences 

Art Miller is a Distinguished Research Oceanographer (equivalent to Distinguished Full Professor) and a Senior Lecturer in Climate Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD). He is a physical oceanographer who studies oceanic influences on climate variability using a combination of computer simulation models and observational analysis. He also is increasingly involved in working with biologists to try to understand how physical oceanographic changes affect oceanic ecosystems. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 refereed publications and has had funding from NSF, NOAA, NASA, ONR, DOE, and the CA Dept of Boating and Waterways. He typically advises 2-8 Ph.D. students in his group. His research extends from basic issues in dynamical oceanography to a variety of topics in climate dynamics, atmospheric dynamics, coupled ocean-atmosphere interactions, ocean data assimilation, regional impacts of global climate change, and oceanic ecosystem response to physical forcing. His earlier papers involved the field of Pacific decadal variability. His recent interests include diagnosing climate regime changes in the physics and biology of the California Current, assessing the impact of climate changes on marine ecosystems in the North Pacific, and assessing the impact of mesoscale sea surface temperature anomalies on regional coupled ocean-atmosphere variability.

Vice President
Energy and Sustainability

Jeremy M. Martin is Vice President, Energy & Sustainability at the Institute of the Americas, an inter-American public policy think-tank located at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The Institute of the Americas Energy & Sustainability Program works to foster a deeper understanding of the most critical energy issues facing the Western Hemisphere. Jeremy spends his time delving into the geopolitics of energy and closely following energy industry trends and policy issues across the Americas, and is a frequent commentator and writer on Latin American and energy issues.

Jeremy has testified before the US Congress on energy issues in Latin America, teaches a graduate course in Latin American Energy Policy at UCSD and the University of San Diego (USD) and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Inter-American Dialogue’s Energy Advisor newsletter. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Diplomacy Council and is a member of the host committee for the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation San Diego Chapter annual Bet on Cures event. Jeremy graduated with honors in History from The Citadel in Charleston, SC and a Masters in International Affairs/International Development from the American University in Washington, DC.

Associate Professor
Economics

Mark Jacobsen's research focuses on energy and environmental policy and addresses two main themes: the first is environmental regulation of transportation and the automobile industry, including the use of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and gasoline taxes. The second theme addresses optimal energy and environmental policy in the context of the broader economy, considering efficiency in the presence of Ricardian rents, untaxes activity in the informal sector, and green preferences. 

Assistant Professor
Anthropology

Isabel Rivera-Collazo is an Assistant Professor in Biological, Ecological and Human Adaptations to Climate Change at the Department of Anthropology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She received her Ph.D. from University College London in 2011. Dr. Rivera-Collazo is an environmental archaeologist specializing in geoarchaeology, archaeomalacology, coastal and marine processes, maritime culture and climate change, with regional interests in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean Basin and the Neotropics (Pan Caribbean region), Israel, and the eastern Mediterranean. Her research focuses on the effect that human activity has had over island ecosystems through time, as well as how people have responded to climatic and environmental change in the past. Dr. Rivera-Collazo's work focuses on resilience and adaptation, investigating what decisions enhance or reduce adaptive success. Taking an applied approach, Dr. Rivera-Collazo also works with local communities in the quest for understanding the current and expected impacts of climate change, including threats to coastal heritage.