Teaching
Courses taught at Stony Brook University.
This course strengthens skills in understanding and evaluating scientific papers, writing scientific commentary, and presenting to an audience. Topics are drawn from current research in global climate change relevant to a wide range of disciplines across marine and atmospheric sciences and sustainability studies. The course is organized into four modules: atmospheric science, marine science, sustainability studies, and communicating climate science to the public.
A graduate methods course in multivariate statistics for the atmospheric, marine, and sustainability sciences, centered on techniques for analyzing spatially distributed geophysical data. It moves from exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing through clustering, spatial interpolation, and principal component analysis, then into regression and causal inference — instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences — and closes with machine learning, covering cross-validation, penalized regression, tree-based methods, and neural networks. Students learn these methods in a research setting, through extensive presentations and problem sets rather than lectures alone. Each student brings a dataset of their own, applies the techniques to it across the semester, and takes part in interpreting the results obtained by classmates.
A project-oriented course on the research designs behind questions that span climate change, human health, and public policy, taught through hands-on work with real data. It is built around four questions: Is this a crystal ball? — understanding and analyzing climate model outputs; Is there a historical lesson? — using historical data to quantify the effects of climate change; Will it get worse? — projecting future climate impacts; and What should we do? — analyzing policy scenarios, including cost–benefit analysis and integrated assessment models. Students develop the skills needed to analyze and visualize data, interpret reports and studies, and design and conduct their own research in climate change and human health.