Karen McKinnon

Karen McKinnon is a professor of Statistics and the Environment, and the Pritzker Chair in Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research sits at the nexus of climate change and statistics, and is aimed at improving our understanding and prediction of climate extremes, variability, and change. She is a 2021 Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering, and has served as an advisor for both city governments and private companies regarding climate change. Prof. McKinnon received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University, as well as an M.Sc. from Victoria University of Wellington. She was an Advanced Study Program post-doc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an Applied Scientist at Descartes Labs before joining UCLA.

Email: kmckinnon at ucla dot edu
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Suqin is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA. She works with Prof. Karen McKinnon at UCLA and Dr. Isla Simpson at NCAR to understand the role of large scale atmospheric circulation and land surface in affecting temperature variability. She will apply a variety of statistical methods to predict the temperature distribution. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, working with Prof. Stephan Fueglistaler and Dr. Kirsten Findell. She completed her Ph.D. in 2019 working on water isotopes and tropical convection, advised by Prof. Jonathon Wright at Tsinghua University and Prof. David Romps at UC Berkeley.

Email: sqduan at ucla dot edu
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Nathan is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. His current research is focused on better understanding long-term climate variability, using tree ring data to develop Bayesian models for climate reconstruction before the widespread use of meteorological instruments.

Email: nhwangbo at ucla dot edu

Kyle is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. His current research is focused on multiple hypothesis testing in climate research, exploring how correlation through space and time impact the false discovery rate and affect inference, and on modeling the changes in precipitation variance.

Email: kylemcevoy at ucla dot edu

Hannah is a first-year PhD student in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She works with Pablo Saide and Karen McKinnon to better quantify the effect of climate change on fire severity and assess the resulting impact of air pollution on urban populations.

Email: hmyint at ucla dot edu

Mady is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. Her current research interests involve leveraging statistical methodology to improve and inform land-atmosphere interaction models.

Email: mbeckner at ucla dot edu