MACH Director, Dr. Bob Kopp, has been named a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s 2026 Ambassador Award. The award honors scientists whose work has had an outstanding societal impact and who have shown exceptional leadership in connecting science with the public and with policy. AGU considers the quality of a nominee’s contributions; the scope and duration of their impact; engagement across the Earth and space sciences; reach beyond the scientific community; pioneering and multidisciplinary work; and contributions to the common good.
Those criteria describe Dr. Kopp’s career well, as his work spans climate and sea-level science, economics, public policy, risk analysis, and decision-making. At Rutgers, Dr. Kopp directs the NSF-funded Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH), which brings together researchers from across the natural and social sciences, engineering, planning, and the humanities to better understand and manage coastal climate risk. He is also one of the directors of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration combining climate science, economics, and data science to understand the human and economic consequences of climate change.
Beyond Rutgers, he has served as a Lead Author of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and as one of the lead authors of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, contributing to multiple chapters, including those on climate models, scenarios and projections, and sea-level rise. His work has helped connect fundamental Earth science with the information needed by governments, communities, and other decision-makers confronting the consequences of a changing climate.
The AGU Ambassador Award recognizes exactly this kind of broad and sustained impact—across disciplines, across the scientific community, and beyond it.
See the full post on the Rutgers Earth and Planetary Sciences website.