Four professors joined Columbia Climate School’s tenured faculty in 2024. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work and great promise for continued contributions at the leading edge of the disciplines.
Sheila Foster is an accomplished legal scholar known for her pioneering work on environmental and climate justice, as well as for developing new models of urban governance. Her scholarship examines how conceptions of “justice” that lay at the heart of Title VI and environmental policies do not provide opportunity for redress for communities bearing the brunt of environmental degradation. It also explores how cities and communities can work to create more just governance structures.
Her first book, “From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Movement” (2001), identifies the mechanisms by which minority communities in Chester, Pennsylvania, bore the brunt of toxic and polluting plants and sheds light on various “ground up” efforts of the residents as they fought back against the expansion of such plants. Other more recent publications include the 2011 law review article, “The City as Commons,” and the 2022 award-winning, co-authored book, “Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions to Self-Sustaining Communities.” She holds an affiliate professorship with the Columbia Law School.
Foster earned her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She served on the faculty of Rutgers University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University before joining the Columbia faculty in 2024.
Radley Horton is a leading climate scientist who studies extreme weather events due to climate change and their impacts, focusing in particular on improving traditional risk assessments.
In a representative paper on this front, “Risks of Synchronized Low Yields are Underestimated in Climate and Crop Model Projections,” Horton and his co-authors explore the question of how to quantify risks in global food security by comparing risks implied in models versus actual frequencies of co-occurrences. Horton’s work has a direct impact on policy and his work has helped improve the accuracy of modeling. He has testified before both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and presented his work at venues including the White House and the State Department. He has received funding from multiple sources including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the World Wildlife Fund, among others.
Horton earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2017.
Jason Smerdon is a paleoclimatologist and is known for his work on climate variability and change during the Common Era. He is a leader in formulating and developing methods for reconstructing global climate fields.
Smerdon’s research combines the statistical analysis of big data sets with climate model simulations to explore historical and modern day megadroughts, the impact of volcanoes on climate, as well as precipitation trends. One of his biggest contributions to the field is the development and analyses of the Paleo Hydrodynamics Data Assimilation product, which is a state-of-the-art estimate of climate conditions over the last 2000 years. Such advancements provide a crucial context to understand present and future climate change due to human activities.
Smerdon earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He joined the Columbia community in 2005.
Mingfang Ting is a leader in the field of climate dynamics. Her scholarship examines drivers of extreme climate events by focusing on both internal climate variability and human-induced climate change.
Her research includes a wide range of topics, including stationary waves, heat waves, extreme rainfall, atmosphere-ocean interactions, variations in the Asian monsoon, and Arctic sea ice loss. Ting has been recognized with numerous awards, including the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. In 2021, Ting was named by Reuters as one of the world’s top climate scientists. She has also brought funding to Columbia from a variety of funding agencies, including NASA, NOAA, the United States Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, and NSF.
Ting earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She served on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining the Columbia faculty in 2003.
This announcement was first published by the Columbia Office of the Provost.
