People
Our lab forges deep expertise in climate and data science, with alumni now enjoying stable positions in academia or industry.
Principal Investigator
Julien Emile-Geay
Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, USC
Julien is principal investigator, common denominator, constant cogitator, mindful meditator, and occasionally takes the group out to lunch.
Current Members
Deborah Khider
Honorary Member — Research Lead, USC Information Sciences Institute
Deborah is a co-conspirator on a number of our projects. Together with Nick McKay and J.E.G., they form the backbone of the LinkedEarth organization and its myriad offshoots.
Jordan Landers
PhD Student
Jordan’s research focuses on paleoclimatology, causal inference, and the development of paleoclimate workflows and software (PaleoBooks, Pyleoclim).
Tanaya Gondhalekar
PhD Student
Tanaya works on paleoclimate data assimilation and proxy system modeling, with a focus on the Last Millennium Reanalysis (LMR4D) and proxy system modeling.
Maryam Niati
PhD Student
Maryam’s research focuses on AI in paleoclimatology as part of the PaleoPAL project. She is presently expanding Ammonyte for tipping point detection.
Alumni
PhD Students
Alexander James — PhD 2025. Paleoclimatology, nonlinear time series analysis. → Geophysicist, Deep Blue Geophysics
Feng Zhu — PhD 2021. Thesis: Seeing the Future through the Lens of the Past: Fusing Paleoclimate Observations and Models → Assistant Professor, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
Jun Hu — PhD 2019. Thesis: Flowstone Ideograms: Deciphering the Climate Messages of Asian Speleothems → Associate Professor, Xiamen University
Sylvia Dee — PhD 2015. Thesis: A multi-model framework for high-resolution paleoclimatology: tracking signals from climate to proxy systems via water isotope systematics → Assistant Professor, Rice University
Jianghao Wang — PhD 2015. Thesis: Taking the temperature of the Common Era: statistics, patterns and dynamical insights → Data Scientist, The MathWorks, Inc.
Master’s Students
Francis Murray — MS EPFL 2024. Thesis: Machine learning approaches to predicting the El Niño-Southern oscillation → Data Scientist, Rolex
Postdocs
Michael Erb — Data assimilation, climate modeling → Research Associate Professor, Appalachian State University
Maud Comboul — Stochastic modeling, reconstruction → Assistant Professor, Université Côte d’Azur (Nice)
Dominique Guillot — Statistics, climate field reconstruction → Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences, University of Delaware
Undergraduate Students
Adam Vaccaro — Scientific Applications Software Engineer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Yuxin Zhou — Postdoc, UC Santa Barbara (PhD from Columbia University)
Tiffany Tsai — Data Scientist, Zillow
Jill Hardy - Research Associate, National Weather Service Warning Decision Training Division