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
Full CV
Postdoctoral Scholars
Laura Paccini
Laura joined the department in Fall 2022 after completing her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. Laura has broad interests in tropical meteorology and climate dynamics, though her PhD explored Atlantic ITCZ dynamics and Amazonian convection in convection permitting simulations with the state-of-the-art ICON model. Her work at UVA will involve investigating environmental differences in MCS vs. isolated convection in ICON, compared to observations, as well as evaluating the role of land-atmosphere interactions and cloud-radiation interactions in the partitioning of MCS vs. isolated convection and its influences on the diurnal cycle of precipitation and precipitation extremes in Amazonia.
Email: wcq7pz@virginia.edu
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 will work on a project aimed at characterizing hydroclimatic variability in the southeastern US as it relates to water availability and storage.
Email: pfq8cd@virginia.edu
Graduate Students
Sayali Kulkarni
Sayali joined the department in Fall 2021. She has broad interests in tropical meteorology and dynamics, including convective aggregation, ITCZ dynamics, and tropical cyclones. At present, her work examines environmental controls on mesoscale convective system lifecycles, cold pools, and convective organization/aggregation.
Email: ejb6nj@virginia.edu
Emma Dawson
Emma started her graduate work in Spring 2022 after graduating as a undergraduate from the department in December 2021 as an Echols Scholar. She is interested in cloud feedbacks and has been working on improving our understanding of how a model’s cloud climatology relates to the strength of its simulated cloud feedbacks and climate sensitivity using a variety of CMIP6 experiments.
Email: emd6wn@virginia.edu
Logan Longacre
Logan joined the department as an MS student in Fall 2022. Logan is a recent graduate of the University of Kansas and will be working on regional hydroclimatological changes in the tropics and examining cloud-circulation interactions in observations.
Email: anx8td@virginia.edu
Rebecca Weinstein
Rebecca joined the department as a PhD student in Fall 2023. Rebecca is a recent graduate of Virginia Tech and will be working on process-level studies of tropical deep convection using DOE ARM data.
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 will be working on a project studying cloud-circulation interactions in GCMs, co-advised by Prof. Kevin Grise.
Email: ucp3yt@virginia.edu
Group Alumni
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