Karen McKinnon

Karen is an Assistant Professor at UCLA, joint between the Department of Statistics and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability Previously, she was an Applied Scientist at Descartes Labs in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and an Advanced Study Program post-doctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research working with Clara Deser. She completed her PhD, advised by Peter Huybers, in 2015 in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at Harvard University. Her research focuses on developing physical and statistical models for climate variability and change, with a particular interest in the weather-climate continuum.

Email: kmckinnon at ucla dot edu
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Wenwen is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with John Chiang on seasonal transitions of the East Asian summer monsoon. Her research bridges observations, theory, and numerical modeling to understand the dynamics of regional climate, from the past to the future. At the IoES, she collaborates with Karen McKinnon at UCLA and Isla Simpson from NCAR to explore the role of the land surface in influencing temperature variability.

Email: wenwenkong at ucla dot edu
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Sam is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at UCLA. Prior to starting his PhD, he received his MS in Statistics from the University of Chicago advised by Michael Stein, where he worked on computational techniques for non-stationary spatial modeling. His current research is focused on statistical analysis of Argo temperature data in order to better understand how ocean heat content is changing in response to anthropogenic global warming.

Email: samuelbaugh at ucla dot edu
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Dhruv is a 4th year undergraduate majoring in Computational Mathematics at UCLA. His interests lie in the application of computational and statistical techniques to climate science and policy related topics. His current research is focused on understanding how the land surface influences heatwaves, with a focus on North America.

Email: dchakraborty at ucla dot edu

Avery is a senior pursuing a B.S. in Statistics. She is interested in the application of statistical methods in climate science research, and her current focus is on land surface interactions with the atmosphere before and during heatwaves. Avery hopes to later pursue a masters in data science, with a focus on climate science or legislative research.

Email: averyrose98 at ucla dot edu