Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Noon to 1 :30 p.m.
The Faculty Club
Climate change represents a growing threat to populations around the world, including many communities across Rhode Island. Cobb will share new findings that bring the climate crisis into clearer focus, and showcase the work of Brown faculty whose research advances our understanding of climate change impacts and solutions. She will highlight Brown's leadership in meeting the climate challenge and outline a vision for even greater impact and engagement on climate solutions at Brown in the years to come.
Biography
A professor of environment and society, and of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown, Kim Cobb is an award-winning climate scientist who served among the lead authors of the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2021. Her work focuses on building capacity for climate solutions and advancing understanding of future climate change impacts, especially in regard to climate extremes and coastal flood hazards.
In conducting her research, Cobb has sailed on numerous oceanographic cruises and caving expeditions in the Borneo rainforests. For nearly two decades, her research focused on unraveling the mysteries of El Niño and La Niña events and how those weather phenomena have changed over time. By applying oxygen isotopes and radiometric dating techniques to the skeletons of living and ancient corals, Cobb and her colleagues have created a record of El Niño and La Niña events going back 7,000 years.
Cobb earned her Ph.D. in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2002 and a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University in 1996. She spent two years at California Institute of Technology in the Department of Geological and Planetary Sciences and joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2004, where she served as the faculty director of the Global Change Program and the ADVANCE professor for diversity, equity and inclusion for the College of Sciences.
Cobb has received numerous awards for her research, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007 and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was named the Hans Oeschger Medalist by the European Geoscience Union in 2019.
In January of this year, the Biden administration appointed Cobb a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which exists to offer the U.S. president objective, expert advice on the effectiveness of the U.S. intelligence community.