The Oceans and Climate Lab is excited to welcome two new postdocs to the team in Fall 2022. (Soon-to-be) Dr. Ulla Heede will join the Oceans and Climate Lab as a CIRES Postdoctoral Fellow. Ulla is completing her Ph.D. in Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale; her research is on tropical climate dynamics, especially toward understanding how the tropical Pacific coupled ocean-atmosphere system responds to anthropogenic radiative forcing. Ulla completed her undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge (UK). As a graduate student at Yale, her research combining satellites and climate models was recognized by NASA through the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship. While at CU, Ulla plans to isolate the effects of enhanced eastern Pacific warming on vegetation through the land component of global climate climate models, and bring this work into a societal context through collaboration with adaptation and mitigation experts.
In addition, (soon-to-be) Dr. Will Rush will join the Oceans and Climate Lab as a Postdoctoral Research Associate through a collaborative grant from the NSF Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change (P2C2) program. Will is currently completing his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, where his research is focused on the interface between climate model analysis and paleoclimate proxy interpretation, primarily focused on hydroclimatic changes. This fall, Will will join a collaborative team of researchers at CIRES, Yale (Juan Lora), WHOI (Alan Seltzer), and NOAA (Dillon Amaya) to investigate the influence of ice sheets and ocean-atmosphere interaction on the hydroclimate of the western United States during the Last Glacial Maximum, primarily through the use of coupled climate model simulations.