Principal Investigator
Kathleen Schiro
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Environmental Sciences
Education: Ph.D. and M.S., Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles; B.A., Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
Email: kschiro@virginia.edu
Postdoctoral Scholars
Swatah Borkotoky
Swatah joined the department in Fall 2023 after completing his PhD at Cornell University. Swatah’s PhD thesis involved reconstructing extreme precipitation based on tree-ring based moisture proxies across the Western US and studying associated projected changes in patterns of atmospheric circulation under climate change in the context of past variability suggested by the paleo record. Swatah is a UVA Environmental Institute Climate Fellow co-advised by Prof. Kevin Grise and works on characterizing synoptic weather regimes as they relate to precipitation variability and extremes.
Email: pfq8cd@virginia.edu
Graduate Students
Sayali Kulkarni
Sayali joined the department in Fall 2021. Her work examines environmental controls on mesoscale convective system lifecycles, cold pools, and convective organization/aggregation.
Email: sayalirk@email.virginia.edu
Emma Dawson
Emma started her graduate work in Spring 2022 after graduating as an undergraduate from the department in December 2021 as an Echols Scholar. She studies high cloud feedbacks, their sources of uncertainty, and has been working on improving our understanding of how a model’s climatology relates to the strength of its simulated cloud feedbacks and climate sensitivity using a variety of CMIP5/6 experiments.
Email: emd6wn@virginia.edu
Rebecca Weinstein
Rebecca joined the department as a PhD student in Fall 2023. Rebecca is a recent graduate of Virginia Tech. She has been studying environmental controls on deep convection in the southern Great Plains and southeastern US using convective tracking datasets, DOE ARM field site data, and reanalysis.
Email: jca4zw@virginia.edu
Jun-Jie Chang
Jun-Jie joined the department as a PhD student in Fall 2023. Jun-Jie is a recent graduate of the National Taiwan University and is working on a project studying regional variability in low cloud climatology, co-advised by Prof. Kevin Grise.
Email: ucp3yt@virginia.edu
Jeremy Corner
Jeremy joined the department as a PhD student in Fall 2024. Jeremy is a recent MS graduate of Northern Illinois University and is working on a project using convolutional neural networks to model and understand using XAI techniques regional precipitation variability and extremes in the United States using CESM Large Ensemble output. He is co-advised by Prof. Antonios Mamalakis (EVSC/SDS).
Email: ucp3yt@virginia.edu
Group Alumni
Logan Longacre – former MS student, now at Environmental Resources Management
Emma Dawson – former MS student, now staff in the interim in Schiro Lab
Laura Paccini – former postdoc, now at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Piyush Garg – former postdoc, now at Argonne National lab
Rebecca Hall – former undergraduate major in the Distinguished Major’s Program, now in graduate school in the Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison
Megan Doan – former undergraduate researcher, now pursuing undergraduate major in Statistics
Jennie Lee – former undergraduate summer intern, Virginia-North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, now in a PhD program at UCSD for Chemistry
Everest Litchford – former undergraduate summer intern from Cornell University
Patrick Roney – former undergraduate researcher in the Distinguished Major’s Program, now in graduate school for Biostatistics at Georgetown University
Emma Sullivan – former undergraduate researcher