SOCORRO, N.M. – The Graduate Student Association is presenting a fully online GSA Interdisciplinary Symposium this year, with the theme of Climate Change.

The event will be all day Friday, April 9. The Zoom link will be posted her when it’s available.

GSA President Henry Prager said the theme was selected for the 2020 event; however, that event was scrapped due to the pandemic. Prager said he and his fellow officers are putting together a varied lineup of speakers from different disciplines. This year, the GSA will present an event with six speakers on various angles of Climate Change, with a panel discussion and Q&A to follow.

“Climate change is an existential threat that affects everyone,” Prager said. “We have increased disasters, more droughts, and more weird weather that we never anticipated. It’s important for everyone to be informed and do what they can to make a difference.”

One of the keynote speakers is Dr. Julian Reyes, an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the Office of Global Change at the U.S. Department of State. He will discuss how communication and policy changes can create positive changes in the climate and environment.

Other keynote speakers will include Dr. Richard Alley of Penn State, who will talk about the receding ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica; and NASA scientist Dr. Kartik Sheth who will discuss diversity and how climate change disproportionally affects minorities. More details about their talks will be forthcoming.

Dr. Kip Carrico of NMT’s Environmental Engineering Department will present a talk as well. The two remaining speakers will be announced soon.

Dr. Julian Reyes

Reyes' talk is “From Local to Global: Building Communication and Policy Capacity to Solve the Climate Crisis.”

As an early career scientist, Reyes has engaged heavily in climate change science policy and communication efforts working at multiple scales (local to international) and with diverse stakeholders (farmers to policymakers). He will share lessons learned, successes, and challenges faced: as a graduate student building science policy/science communication experience; as a post-doctoral fellow at the USDA Southwest Climate Hub bringing climate-relevant resources to farmers, ranchers, and landowners in the American Southwest; and currently as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of State.

“I hope sharing these experiences will provide opportunities for graduate students and early career scientists to engage with decision makers and the general public,” he said.

Reyes leads negotiation issues on gender, climate education, outreach, and training issues at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate, and negotiates on climate science issues at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Arctic Council. He works at the science-society interface, and has frequently engaged diverse stakeholders including university extension professionals, policymakers, farmers, ranchers, and the general public.

Reyes received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Washington State University. He was a Fellow with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Southwest Climate Hub from 2016 to 2019, building climate-informed agricultural risk management tools. Prior to that, he was a Science Policy Fellow at the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 2014 and a Fulbright Research Scholar in 2011 in Germany. 

Dr. Richard Alley

Dr. Richard Alley is Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. He studies the great ice sheets to help predict future changes in climate and sea level, and has made four trips to Antarctica, nine to Greenland, and more to Alaska and elsewhere. 

Alley participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has provided requested advice to numerous government officials in multiple administrations from both major political parties including a US Vice President, multiple Presidential Science Advisors, and committees and individual members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

He was presenter for the PBS TV miniseries on climate and energy “Earth: The Operators’ Manual,” and author of the book. His popular account of climate change and ice cores, “The Two-Mile Time Machine.”

Dr. Kartik Sheth

Dr. Kartik Sheth is a program scientist in the astrophysics division within NASA's Science Mission Directorate. He is the public affairs lead for the division, and a member of the communications team.

Sheth earned his bachelor’s in Physics from Grinnell College in 1993, a master’s in physics with a focus on Physics Education from University of Minnesota in 1995 and a master’s and doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Maryland in College Park in 2001. After his graduate work he was a post-doc and staff member at Caltech from 2001-2009. 

Before coming to NASA HQ, Sheth was a tenured astronomer at the NRAO in Charlottesville, Va., and also served as the Director for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Commissioning and Science Verification Liaison for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter (ALMA) telescope in Chile.

Dr. Kip Carrico

Dr. Kip Carrico is an associate professor, New Mexico Tech. His talk is titled “Biomass Burning, Air Quality and Climate in the Southwestern U.S.” Wildland fire smoke emissions are increasingly a concern in the southwestern U.S. and other regions globally.  Feedbacks between climate, fire, smoke, and air quality are a key concern as warming and drying climatic trends are an important intersection of wildland fire.

Carrico’s team has conducted measurements of ambient smoke and laboratory measurements of fresh emissions of biomass burning smoke with a focus on biomass fuels from native and invasive species of the Southwest. He will discuss such trends and present specific results on the physical properties of smoke aerosols and their significance to air quality and climate. Alteration of fuel regimes and properties in the southwestern US have important implications for smoke emissions and their resulting impacts.

 Carrico’s areas of specialization are air quality, aerosols, climate change and their relationship to energy. His area of expertise is the interaction of air pollution with the climate system with respect to climate forcing. This expertise includes the relationship between biomass burning, air quality and climate, and it includes co-authorship on over 50 technical journal articles in the peer-reviewed literature. Prior to joining the faculty at New Mexico Tech, he served as a senior scientist and project manager at AECOM Inc.

He previously taught as an adjunct faculty member in the Clean Energy Technology program at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins. Prior positions included research scientist at Colorado State University in the Department of Atmospheric Science and postdoctoral scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology Civil and Environmental Engineering program. Carrico earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering with an air quality and climate specialization from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

 

 

 

 

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