The Smerdon Climate Lab is excited to welcome two new graduate students! Aandishah Samara and Ibuki Sugiura joined Columbia in fall 2022 as first-year graduate students in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Both have interests in hydroclimate variability and change and will be working on two collaborative NSF projects (here and here) aimed at understanding how variability in surface ocean temperatures, particularly those in the Pacific Ocean, impact drought patterns around the world. Their projects will be advised jointly with Richard Seager.
Aandishah earned her B.A. in Earth System Science and M.S. in Geographical Information Systems at Clark University. Her main interests are climate change, ocean-atmosphere interactions, and applications of remote sensing. She is fascinated by the impacts of climate change on the interactions between the atmosphere and hydrosphere, and the implications for future climate risks and impacts. Born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she is also interested in the impacts of climate change on people, especially minority communities.
Ibuki graduated from Smith College in 2022 with B.A. in Geosciences and Mathematics. She is interested in the ocean’s role in past, modern, and future climates, and she hopes to explore the ocean-atmosphere interactions and their effects on climate change and variability using both paleo and modern data.
Welcome Aandishah and Ibuki!
