Sylvia Dee is a an assistant professor and climate scientist at Rice University specializing in atmospheric modeling, water isotope physics, and paleoclimate data-model comparison. She completed her undergraduate degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering with certificates in Geological Engineering and Environmental Sciences at Princeton University, and her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California Earth Sciences department. She previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the UT Institute for Geophysics and Brown University.
Welcome! The Climate, Water, and Energy lab is headed by Dr. Sylvia Dee, a climate scientist specializing in atmospheric modeling, water isotope physics, and paleoclimate data-model comparison. Sylvia completed her undergraduate degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering with certificates in Geological Engineering and Environmental Sciences at Princeton University, and her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California Earth Sciences department. She previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the UT Institute for Geophysics and Brown University. Sylvia's research projects include topics in climate modeling and climate of the past millennium, using general circulation models (GCMs) and proxy system models (PSMs) to explore the dynamics of the tropical climate system.
Sylvia is the developer of the water isotope-enabled, fast-physics atmospheric dynamical model, SPEEDY-IER, and a public platform for proxy system modeling development, PRYSM. This modeling platform allows for multi-centennial simulations of common era climate with water isotope physics, which, coupled with proxy system models for proxy records, facilitates the comparison of model output to paleoclimate data.
Jun Hu is at postdoctoral researcher working on using stable water isotopes to track modern and future climate change, including the trend of the Hadley Circulation. He is also interested in studying long-term hydroclimate variability in the past by using isotope-enabled climate models. Jun received a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Southern California, where he studied the interpretation of Asian speleothem oxygen isotopes. He got his M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and B.S from Lanzhou University in China.
Lizzie Wallace is a joint Rice Academy and Pan Postdoctoral Fellow studying the interplay between climate and hurricane activity on long timescales. Her current research focuses on integrating natural archives of local hurricane strikes in the Atlantic with hurricane model data to study how and why hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico have changed over the past 2000 years. Lizzie received her B.S. from the University of Virginia in Civil Engineering and Philosophy in 2015 and her PhD in Paleoceanography from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 2020.
Allison Lawman is a postdoctoral researcher that uses future climate projections to understand how rising ocean temperatures and acidification impact the likelihood of coral bleaching events in the Gulf of Mexico. She is also interested in past, present, and future changes in tropical climate variability. Allison received a B.S. in Geology-Chemistry from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from UT Austin, where she used geochemical proxies from corals to reconstruct past changes in ENSO variability.
Xinyue Luo is a first-year Ph.D. student at Rice working in the Climate Lab. She graduated from Nanjing University with a B.S. in Atmospheric Science. Xinyue is interested in climate variability and climate dynamics. She is currently working on a project about ENSO and its teleconnections in North America with Dr. Sylvia Dee.
Charlie Marshall is a first year PhD student at Rice working in the Climate Lab. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Math. He is interested in climate modeling and climate dynamics. He is currently working on a project that compares different proxies and models of tropical African climate since the last glacial maximum
Melinda Ding is an undergraduate researcher in the Climate Lab majoring in Computer Sciences. Melinda builds Graphical User Interfaces for existing climate and proxy system models, and applies machine learning techniques to improve our understanding of past and future climates.
Sue Kim is a senior at Rice University studying Computer Science and Statistics from Seattle, Washington. She is assisting on a project investigating temperature changes in Africa over the last 20,000 years by tuning and analyzing climate models.