The view from UCSB! Join our group and enjoy whale watching on your lunch break :)
Samantha Stevenson (PI)
In October 2017, I joined the Bren School as an assistant professor. I am also affiliated with the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Sciences, and collaborate closely with the UCSB Geography Department.
From 2014-2017, I was a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in what is now the Paleo and Polar Climate section of the Climate & Global Dynamics Laboratory, working with Bette Otto-Bliesner and John Fasullo. Before that, I was an NSF Ocean Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Hawaii-Manoa Department of Oceanography working with Brian Powell.
From 2007-2011, I completed my PhD at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department with Baylor Fox-Kemper (who is now at Brown University), helped out by a NASA Earth and Space Science Graduate Fellowship.
Current Group Members
Postdoctoral Scholars
Se-Yong Song
Se-Yong is a postdoc who joined the group in September 2023. He received his PhD in February 2023 from Hanyang University in South Korea, working with Dr. Sang-Wook Yeh on Pacific climate variability, marine heatwaves, and teleconnections between the Pacific Ocean and temperature/rainfall impacts over North America.
At UCSB, Se-Yong is collaborating on a DOE-funded project to understand how high-resolution atmosphere-ocean processes in the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension region influence Pacific decadal variability as well as precipitation patterns in the western US.
Yingying Feng
Yingying is a postdoc who joined the group in October 2023. She received her PhD from the Chinese Academy of Science (Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research) in January 2023, working on using regional model simulations to understand the response of precipitation in northwestern China to future climate change. Prior to that, she received her masters degree from the Chinese Academy of Science (Institute of Geology and Geophysics) on combining paleoclimate simulations with proxy records to examine changing moisture sources in Mongolia during the Last Glacial Maximum.
At UCSB, Yingying is collaborating on an NSF-funded project to use the isotope-enabled Community Earth System Model to identify isotopic patterns of past interactions between ocean basins and evaluate these using coral oxygen isotope records.
Aoyun Xue
Aoyun is a postdoc who joined the group in November 2023. He received his PhD from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in June, 2022, working with Fei-Fei Jin and Wenjun Zhang on tropical instability wave-ENSO interactions. Prior to that, he worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Hawaii at Manoa from Nov 2018-Dec 2020. Following the completion of his PhD, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Pohang University of Science and Technology working with Prof. Jong-Seong Kug on the Super El Ninos' impacts on climate regime shift for one year.
At UCSB, Aoyun is collaborating on an NSF-funded project looking at global climate models’ ability to represent tropical instability wave dynamics, their interaction with ENSO, and their effect on future ENSO projections.
PhD Students
Cali Pfleger
Cali is a PhD student, who joined the group in Fall 2020. She graduated from Cornell College in May 2020, and was previously a summer undergraduate researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she combined paleoclimate proxy records with climate model simulations to understand the Australian monsoon response to large volcanic eruptions. At UCSB, she is using the ‘Iso2k’ oxygen isotope database and isotope-enabled climate models to further explore the volcanic influence on climate, as well as investigating the effects of solar geoengineering on Pacific fisheries.
Chen Xing
Chen is a PhD student, who joined the group in Fall 2020. She was previously a PhD student at the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in Nanjing, China, where she studied the influence of volcanic aerosols on the El Nino/Southern Oscillation. At UCSB, she is investigating human-driven aerosol emissions effects on Pacific Decadal Variability in large ensembles of climate model simulations, as well as examining how climate change and solar geoengineering strategies affect ENSO dynamics.
Deanna Mireles
Deanna is a PhD student, who joined the group in Fall 2021. She graduated from the University of Arizona in May 2021, where among other things she worked in Dr. Kaustubh Thirumalai’s lab analyzing the isotopic signatures in foraminifera. At UCSB, she is beginning work using large ensemble experiments with biogeochemistry-enabled climate models to understand how interannual climate variability affects marine ecosystems off the West Coast of the US.
Sadie Cwikiel
Sadie is a PhD student, who joined the group in Fall 2022. She earned her bachelors and masters degrees from Stanford University, as part of the Earth Systems Program. Her honors thesis focused on the effects of El Nino on physical and biological conditions in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, including both field and satellite observations. Here at UCSB, she is beginning studies on the effects of tropical Pacific climate variability on South Pacific marine ecosystems, with emphasis on the Moorea Coral Reef LTER.
Shay Magahey
Shay is a PhD student, who joined the group in Fall 2023. She earned her bachelors degree from the University of Georgia, where she worked with Dr. Gabriel Kooperman on analyzing output from the Community Earth System Large Ensemble to look at biomass burning aerosols’ impact on precipitation. She is also the recipient of a 2023 NSF Graduate Student Research Fellowship!
At UCSB, Shay is working on analyzing the response of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to climate change in CESM and other large ensembles, and understanding the relationship of this response to ocean dynamical processes.
Undergraduate Students
Miriam Martin-Chales
Miriam is a UCSB undergraduate and participant in the Bren-Environmental Studies Fellows program. She is working on development of Web materials for the Climate DataLab educational suite, which will be launched in early 2024.
Evelyn Bermudez
Evelyn is also a UCSB undergraduate and Bren-ES Fellow. She is working on developing Jupyter notebook-based tutorials for assisting learners to manipulate climate model output, which will be incorporated into the Climate DataLab project.
Henry Jurney
Henry is a UCSB physics major, working on extending the capabilities of the Python-based ENSO Metrics Package (originally developed by the CLIVAR ENSO metrics working group) to analyze ENSO behavior in large ensembles of climate model output.
Group Photos
November 2023: Bren Hall Deckers Deck
Right to left: Sam, Henry, Se-Yong, Shay, Sadie, Deanna, Aoyun, Chen, Evelyn, Miriam, Yingying
The Team (Nov 2020)
First “official” lab group photo: on Zoom, naturally!
Xingying’s going away dinner
April 2021
Group Alumni
Uday Thapa
Uday was a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow, from August 2020 - July 2022. He earned his PhD in Spring 2020 at the University of Minnesota, working with Scott St. George on reconstructing jet-stream variability over the Himalayas using tree ring records. Prior to that, he earned a masters degree from Tribhuvan University in Nepal.
Uday’s NOAA CGC fellowship focused on identifying the climate change impact on dry season (boreal winter/spring) storms in the Himalayas, by combining tree ring reconstructions with output from the Community Earth System Model Last Millennium Ensemble (CESM LME). This has important implications for water resource management in Nepal, where climate change is expected to exacerbate water stresses in the coming years.
As of summer 2022, Uday is now a climate risk assessment specialist at CoreLogic, where he is putting his climate science training to practical use in assessing climate-driven hazards.
Midhun Madhavan
Midhun was a postdoctoral researcher from August 2019 - August 2021. He was on leave from Cochin University of Science and Technology in India, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He earned his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology in 2015, working with Dr. Rangaswamy Ramesh. He then completed postdoctoral studies at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, the Department of Geophysics at the University of Chile in Santiago, and the National Institute of Science Education and Research in Bubaneswar, India.
Here at UCSB, Midhun joined our NSF-funded project on the dynamics of oxygen isotopic variations in the tropical Pacific. He used the isotope-enabled Community Earth System Model (CESM) to understand the how modes of natural climate variability such as the El Nino/Southern Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation lead to changes in isotopic patterns, and to improve our interpretation of climate variations seen in speleothem (cave) records.
Danielle Touma
Danielle was a postdoctoral researcher in the group from January 2019 - November 2021. She earned her PhD in fall 2018 from Stanford University’s Earth System Science program, working with Noah Diffenbaugh on extreme events in the climate system.
Here at UCSB, Danielle worked on understanding the contribution of individual anthropogenic and natural forcings to wildfire and extreme precipitation, using large ensemble simulations with the Community Earth System Model (CESM).
Danielle is now an NCAR Advanced Study Program postdoctoral fellow, and will begin a Research Associate position at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics in September of 2023.
Xingying Huang
Xingying was a postdoctoral researcher in the group from October 2019 - April 2021. She earned her PhD in Fall 2016 at the University of California, Davis, working with Dr. Paul Ullrich on regional climate simulation in California and the western US. She then completed postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles working with Dr. Alex Hall on the dynamics of atmospheric rivers and precipitation extremes.
Here at UCSB, Xingying joined our DOE-funded collaborative project on the dynamics of Pacific decadal variability. She coordinated the generation of a new large ensemble of historical and future projection simulations with the DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), and used the results from other large ensembles to understand the mechanisms for changes in midlatitude atmospheric circulation and precipitation extremes.
Xingying is now a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Isabelle Runde
Isabelle was an undergraduate researcher who worked with the group in Summer 2019. She majored in Geography with Earth Science and Statistics minors, and studied the response of drought events to both anthropogenic and natural climate changes using CESM large ensemble simulations.
Cheryl Harrison
Cheryl was a project scientist at UCSB in 2018, while also working at the University of Colorado-Boulder with Nikki Lovenduski. Her focus was on understanding the influence of climate variability on fisheries production.
Cheryl is now an assistant professor at Louisiana State University.