LECTURES

Claudia Tebaldi 
(Senior Science Advisor, Climate Central , USA)

Douglas Nychka 
(Dept of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Colorado Schoof of Mines, Golden, Colorado, USA)

TUTORIALS

Matthew S. Hofkes
(Dept of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Colorado Schoof of Mines, Golden, Colorado, USA)

Brief bio

Claudia Tebaldi is a PhD statistician by training (in fact her interest in Statistics started while a student at Bocconi) and has focused her work on problems related to uncertainty characterization in future projections of climatic changes, at the global and regional scales and particularly in extreme events, and on observation-based so-called detection and attribution studies (is the climate already changing? Can we attribute these changes to human causes?).  But there are only so many papers one wants to write about how much warmer is going to be: that’s why in the last decade she has been keen to work in a multidisciplinary setting, connecting her work on the physical changes of the climate system (for which she mainly worked with atmospheric and climate scientists) to impact studies, risk assessment, scenario characterization (for which she works with economists, hydrologists, demographers, agronomists, engineers, health experts,that’s the beauty of being a statistician).

Claudia has been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change activities since the early 2000s, and was a lead author of its main report for the last two cycles. She is currently an author for the US National Climate Assessment, and she is on several national and international science advisory boards. She also collaborates regularly with Climate Central, a science and communication organization dedicated to educating the US public on the climate change problem and its solutions.

Douglas Nychka is a statistician and data scientist whose areas of research include the theory, computation and application of curve and surface fitting with a focus on geophysical and environmental applications. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the Colorado School of Mines and Senior Scientist  Emeritus  at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado. Before moving to Mines he directed the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at NCAR.  His  current focus in research is the computation of spatial statistics methods for large data sets and the migration of these algorithms into easy to use R packages.

He has coauthored more than 100 research articles and with an h-index of 48.  He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association,  Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and a recipient of the Jerry Sacks Award for interdisciplinary research.