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Welcome back everyone and happy new year! Lunch and learns this quarter have been moved back to Thursdays, 12:30 to 1:30, in Saieh 146. The first lunch will be a get to know you meet and greet on Thursday, January 10th. We have an exciting series this quarter, and the first presentation will be on January 17th.

Hey everyone! While we're not officially having Lunch and Learn again until the Fall quarter begins, anyone who's around come and meet us for a get-together at the Pub on Thursday, July 12 at 5:00 PM. Hope to see you there!

We'll be hearing from Alejandra López Rodriguez, at our usual time and place:

Alejandra López Rodríguez is a second year Masters student at the Harris School of Public Policy. While working as an Environmental Democracy Intern at the World Resources Institute, she conducted research on the issue of violence against environmental and land defenders in Colombia. She will present the main findings of the study, hoping to motivate a discussion on the trade-offs between sustainability, growth, and human rights.

Saieh 419, 12:30pm-1:30pm. 

This is our traditional mid-quarter meet and greet! Now that we've come together for a few weeks we'd like everyone, especially the newcomers, to be able to get to know each others' interests and/or research a bit more (undergrads who may not have your own work yet, don't let this discourage you from coming; feel free to use this to probe the minds of people who are doing what you may be interested in later on). So, in that spirit, we'll be doing a form of research "speed dating"  where we'll all have a bit more opportunity to discuss what we're most interested in and meet some cool people. 

Saieh 419, 12:30pm-1:30pm. 

Talks will resume at our next week. As always, come for the free food, stay for the interdisciplinary exchange!

Good news: we're back in our regular room tomorrow (Saieh 419), to hear from Econ PhD student and all-around smart guy Ishan Nath give a bit of a primer on the frontiers of energy and environmental economics: 

Ishan Nath is a 4th year economics PhD student who works with EPIC and the Climate Impact Lab. He will give a brief overview of contemporary research topics in energy and environmental economics with illustrative examples of the empirical techniques economists use to identify causality. 

See you all there!

We'll be hearing from Morgan O'Neill, the new post-doc in the Geophyscial Sciences Department on "Hurricanes and climate: signal v. noise in the very terrible 2017 season" : 

There has been a lot of popular discussion about the role of climate change in the recent relentless onslaught of North Atlantic hurricanes. I will contextualize the 2017 hurricane season in the historical record, and share the current scientific consensus about what has happened and will happen to hurricanes in a warming world. Are these storms natural or manmade? Both! Maybe!

Keep sending me examples of any climate data you might use / want to know more about as we put together the workshop on interpreting climate data products!

We'll have our first talk of the quarter! Some of you may have met him this first week - James Rising is one of EPIC's new postdocs this year:

James Rising is an interdisciplinary modeler and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).  He studies interaction between society and the planet, and is particularly interested in climate impacts, the water-energy-food nexus, and fisheries.  James will present a new approach to estimating the future of coffee production, as suitable areas shift away from the equator and to higher elevations.

Potential talk on interpreting climate data for social science users

By the way, as per some discussions this week, we're trying to put together a workshop on how to interpret climate/weather/reanalysis data products. For those of you in the social sciences who work with climate data, could you let us know what products / models / data types / etc. you use generally so we can tune this potential talk to you? For those of you in the natural sciences who work on model interpretation/creation/etc. and want to help put this together, please let us know as well!

With the new year, we'll be starting up our Lunch & Learn series again. As with last year, they will be on Thursdays. However, due to the change in TTh class times, they will now be 12:30-1:30, a half hour later than last year. The first one will be 2nd Week, that is Thursday, October 5th, at 12:30pm. We'll send out the location soon, but it will be in Saieh Hall (58th/University) again. 

To any newcomers, here's what we're all about:

The Energy and Climate Young Researchers' Lunch & Learn is a collaboration between RDCEP and EPIC that brings together young researchers from multiple disciplines to foster casual connections, collaborations, and interactions in the field of climate and energy, broadly defined. We meet weekly during the academic year and invite students, research assistants, and postdocs to attend, present research (professors are never present) at any stage in the process, discuss, and build casual connections across disciplines. We will feed you and everyone else attending.

If you're a young researcher or student and are interested in climate and/or energy from any angle, you're invited! We're a fun mix of people studying and working in economics, physics, statistics, public policy, sociology, philosophy, business,...

If you're interested in presenting, leading a discussion, or have any other ideas for the series, please feel free to reach out to us to chat or to grab a copy of our presenter guidelines. 

Looking forward to seeing all the regulars and meeting some newcomers! Tell your friends.