Executive Council (EC)
Administrative Leadership
Executive Council
Klaus Keller
Co-Principal Investigator,
Co-Lead: Decision Analysis, Values and Ethics, & Integration Teams
Co-Lead: Decision Analysis, Values and Ethics, & Integration Teams
Assistant Manager, Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve
NJAES
Lisa Auermuller is the Assistant Manager of the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve (JC NERR) in Tuckerton, NJ where she has been employed there since 2002. Lisa oversees the day-to-day management of JC NERR’s Coastal Center as well as the Reserve’s education, outreach, communications, and Coastal Training Program. Lisa’s primary areas of interest have coastal community vulnerability and resilience as they relate to current and future coastal hazards. Lisa’s work combines natural and social science aspects of the coastal decision-making process. Currently, Lisa is collaborating with NOAA OCM and state and regional partners to assess how well NOAA’s Water Initiative tools and products meet stakeholder needs.
Professor
Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Rutgers University
Robert Kopp, the director of MACH, is a climate scientist who serves at Rutgers University as Director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences and as a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. Professor Kopp’s research focuses on understanding uncertainty in past and future climate change, with major emphases on sea-level change, the interactions between physical climate change and the economy, and the use of climate risk information to information decision-making. He has authored over 120 scientific papers, as well as numerous popular articles. Professor Kopp was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report and of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s 2017 Fourth National Climate Assessment. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a past Leopold Leadership Fellow, and a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s James B. Macelwane medal.
Associate Professor
College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity, University at Albany, State University of New York
DeeDee Bennett Gayle is an Associate Professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany, State University of New York. As director of the Social Vulnerability Lab, her research interests include emergency management, socially vulnerable populations during disasters, emergency communications, disaster policy, and mobile wireless communications. Dr. Bennett Gayle’s work is published in various journals and she has presented at several conferences related to emergency management, disability, wireless technology, and future studies. She has secured several sponsored projects, including from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Bennett Gayle received her Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University in Fire and Emergency Management. She has a unique academic background having received both her M.S. in Public Policy and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is an Advisory Board Member for the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management (I-DIEM).
Assistant Professor
David and Jane Floweree Early Career Professor,
Tulane University, Old Dominion University
Sönke Dangendorf is a coastal engineer and physical oceanographer in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he holds the David and Jane Floweree Early Career Professorship. He obtained his Diploma (2010) and PhD (2014) in Civil Engineering at the University of Siegen, Germany. He was team leader and “Akadmischer Rat” at the Research Institute for Water and Environment (fwu) at the University of Siegen between 2014 and 2019. In 2019 he became Assistant Professor in the Ocean and Earth Sciences Department and the Centre for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA before joining Tulane University in January 2022. His research focuses on understanding of past and future sea-level changes and its various contributors. He is also interested reconstructing past sea-level changes from a combination of the satellite record, tide gauges, salt marsh proxies and different model estimates.
Research Professor
Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory,
Columbia University
Radley Horton is a Research Professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. His research focuses on climate extremes, tail risks, climate impacts, and adaptation. He is the Lead Principal Investigator for the NOAA-Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments-funded Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast. Radley was a Convening Lead Author for the Third National Climate Assessment and is a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. Radley also teaches in Columbia University’s Sustainable Development department.
Director
Science Education Resource Center,
Carleton College
Ellen Iverson, PhD is the Director of the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. Her research interests include investigating the role of communities of practice and networks in co-production of curriculum, policy, and programs, particularly those aimed at broadening access in STEM. Iverson has evaluated more than 40 science education projects and co-lead the national assessment efforts for the NSF InTeGrate STEP Center aimed at improving Earth literacy and building a workforce prepared to tackle urgent environmental and resource issues facing humanity.
Hodgson Distinguished Professor of Engineering
Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College
Before joining Dartmouth Engineering, Klaus Keller was a professor of geosciences at Penn State where he directed the Center for Climate Risk Management. Prior to that, he worked as a research scientist and lecturer at Princeton University and as an engineer in Germany. Professor Keller graduated from Princeton with a PhD in civil and environmental engineering. He received master’s degrees from MIT and Princeton, as well as a Diplom-Ingenieur degree from the Technische Universität Berlin. His research addresses two interrelated questions. First, how can we mechanistically understand past and potentially predict future changes in the Earth system? Second, how can we use this information to design sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible risk management strategies? He analyzes these questions by mission-oriented basic research covering a wide range of disciplines such as engineering, Earth sciences, economics, philosophy, decision science, and statistics. He contributed to reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-edited an open source textbook, and published more than 130 peer-reviewed studies. His research, mentoring, and service have been recognized by several prizes, for example the 2019 Penn State Outstanding Postdoc Mentor Award.
Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy,
Environmental Defense Fund
Carolyn Kousky is Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy at Environmental Defense Fund. Dr. Kousky’s research examines multiple aspects of climate risk management and policy approaches for increasing resilience. She has published numerous articles, reports, and book chapters on the economics and policy of climate risk and disaster finance. She is a co-editor of A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation and author of Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future.
Dr. Kousky has worked with many communities on resilience strategies and developing inclusive models for insurance and disaster recovery. She is the vice-chair of the California Climate Insurance Working Group, a university fellow at Resources for the Future, a non-resident scholar at the Insurance Information Institute, and a member of the Roundtable on Risk and Resilience of Extreme Events at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dr. Kousky is currently an author for the economics chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
For more information about Dr. Kousky’s work, please visit her personal webpage.
She has a B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University.
Associate Professor,
Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Princeton University
Ning Lin is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, where she has affiliate appointments with Princeton School for Public and International Affairs, Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment, and High Meadows Environmental Institute. Lin’s research areas include Natural Hazards and Risk Analysis, Wind Engineering, Coastal Engineering, and Climate Change Impact and Adaptation. Her current primary focus is hurricane risk analysis. She integrates science, engineering, and policy to study hurricane-related weather extremes (strong winds, heavy rainfall, and storm surges), how they change with changing climate, and how their impact on society can be better mitigated. Lin has published in high-impact journals including Science, Nature Climate Change, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a recipient of CAREER award from National Science Foundation (NSF), Natural Hazards Early Career Award and Global Environmental Change Early Career Award from American Geophysical Union (AGU), and Huber Research Prize from American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Lin has been the lead PI or Co-PI for several large NSF projects, including Interdisciplinary Research in Hazards and Disasters (Hazards SEES), Prediction of and Resilience against Extreme Events (PREEVENTS), and Coastlines and People Hubs for Research and Broadening Participation (CoPe). Lin received her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2010. She also received a certificate in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy in 2010 from Princeton. Before rejoining Princeton as an assistant professor in 2012, she conducted research in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT as a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow.
Associate Professor
Earth and Environmental Studies Department, Montclair State University
Jorge Lorenzo-Trueba is a coastal geomorphologist. Using numerical models, integrated with field research, he studies a variety of coastal environments, including barrier islands, fluvial deltas, marshes, and mangroves using a research approach that focuses on long-timescale evolution. Additionally, he is interested in how human activities affect coastal evolution through both the accumulated effects of purposeful engineering activities and the unintentional consequences of land-use change. He earned his B.E. in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid, Spain, before going on to earn his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After that he was a postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Rice University.
Assistant Professor
Department of Human Ecology,
Rutgers University
Dr. Ramenzoni is an environmental anthropologist specialized in human behavioral ecology, coastal communities, and marine and coastal policies. She is an Assistant Professor in Marine Policy at the Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University. Through a mixed methods approach, she studies how socio-ecological factors shape human adaptation, the historical ecology of fishing societies, the impact of environmental uncertainty on decisions about resource use, and household nutrition in coastal environments. Her fieldwork includes communities from Eastern Indonesia, Kalimantan, Cuba, and the U.S. Dr. Ramenzoni has a strong commitment to applied science, co-participatory methods, and policy development.
DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Department of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,
Penn State University
Nancy Tuana is the founding director of the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute. She is a philosopher of science who specializes in issues of values and science. Dr. Tuana is part of an interdisciplinary research team at Penn State that has developed a more robust model of research ethics to more adequately reflect the impacts of ethical issues in scientific practice. Her research includes coupled ethical-epistemic issues in the field of climate science. As a member of the NSF Sustainability Research Network on Sustainable Climate Risk Management and through the Penn State Center for Climate Risk Management she is working to develop best practices for values-informed decision support. Dr. Tuana is also engaged in research on justice issues in the context of climate change and is the author of a number of articles on the topic of gender and climate change and a forthcoming book on race and climate change.