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
Julie Edwards
Julie is a postdoc who joined the group in February 2025. She earned her PhD in 2024 from the University of Arizona, working on reconstructing high-latitude climate and its response to volcanic eruptions using tree rings. She is the recipient of both the NSF Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship (AGS-PRF) and the Bren School Global Change Research Fellowship!
Here at UCSB, she is collaborating with both Sam and with Joan Dudney, to examine how tree ring-based reconstructions can inform estimates of the past variability in atmospheric river events in Southern California.
Na Wang
Na is a postdoc who joined the group in August 2024. She earned her PhD in 2020 from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing, then spent two years at the same institute as a postdoc before moving to Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her research interests at IAP and Rice focused on the dynamics of the East Asian monsoon and its connection with ENSO and external influences in climate over the Holocene and Last Millennium.
Here at UCSB, she has switched gears to collaborate on a NOAA-funded project to understand how large-scale climate variability influences the properties of marine heat waves and extremes in dissolved oxygen in the California Current and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.
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.
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
Fletcher Hozven
Fletcher is a UCSB undergraduate and participant in the Bren-Environmental Studies Fellows program. He led the development of multiple Jupyter notebook-based tutorials and accompanying video products for the Climate DataLab project. He is also working on a senior thesis project with Sam, looking at how background trends in soil moisture lead to dry conditions even at the “end” years of multidecadal “megadrought” events.
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
Postdoctoral 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 moved on after UCSB to become an NCAR Advanced Study Program postdoctoral fellow, then began 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.
Graduate Student Alumni
Deanna Mireles
Deanna was a masters 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. Her thesis used data from the Santa Barbara Long-Term Ecological Research station and other datasets in the Santa Barbara channel to examine the drivers of compound extremes (temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH) during the El Nino and “Blob” marine heat wave events during 2014-16.
Deanna earned her degree in December 2024 and has now moved on to the cool of the Pacific Northwest!
Undergraduate Alumni
Miriam Martin-Chales
Miriam is a UCSB undergraduate and participant in the Bren-Environmental Studies Fellows program. She led the development of Web materials for the Climate DataLab educational suite, which was launched in 2024.
Evelyn Bermudez
Evelyn was also a UCSB undergraduate and Bren-ES Fellow. She helped to develop Jupyter notebook-based tutorials for assisting learners to manipulate climate model output, which have been incorporated into the Climate DataLab project.
Henry Jurney
Henry was 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. He’s since joined Brown University as a PhD student in the Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences!
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.