Kim Cobb

Kim Cobb
Born	Kim Cobb 1974 (age 49–50) Madison, Virginia, US
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University
Occupation	Climate scientist
Known for	Paleoclimatology, Oceanography, Geochemistry

Kim Cobb (born 1974) is an American climate scientist. She is a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Georgia Power Faculty Scholar. She is particularly interested in oceanography, geochemistry and paleoclimate modelling.

Early life and education

Kim Cobb was born in 1974 in Madison, Virginia, US. She grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She became interested in oceanography after attending a summer school at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts. She studied biology and geology at Yale University, where she became increasingly aware of the anthropogenic causes of climate change. She moved off her original pre-med track and applied for a summer program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, graduating in 1996. Cobb completed her PhD in oceanography at Scripps in 2002, hunting El Niño events in a sediment core from Santa Barbara. She spent two years as a post doc at Caltech before joining Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in 2004. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications in major journals. She became a full professor in 2015 and supervises several PhD and MSc students.

Research

Kim Cobb's group seeks to understand global climate change and identify the natural and anthropogenic causes. Cobb's research has taken her on several oceanographic voyages around the tropical Pacific and caving expeditions of the rainforests of Borneo. She focusses on corals and cave stalagmites, particularly those from the last few centuries. Her group generates high-resolution records of the samples it collects, monitoring climate variability, creating models, and characterising variability in the Pacific and Borneo. She and her team collected ancient coral fragments from the islands of Kiribati and Palmyra, aged them with uranium–thorium dating and then used the oxygen isotope ratio cycle to measure the intensity of El Niño events over the last 7,000 years. Cobb is on the editorial board of Geophysical Review Letters.

Awards and recognition

• In 2007, she won the NSF CAREER award and the Georgia Tech Education Partnership Award
• In 2008, Cobb was recognised as one of the nation's top young scientists, winning the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
• In 2009, Cobb received a Kavli 'Frontiers of Science' Fellowship
• Cobb was an invited guest at the White House Workplace Flexibility Policies Event in 2011

Policy and public engagement

Cobb sits on the American Association of Advancement of Science Climate Science Panel, the international CLIVAR Pacific Panel and the international PAGES-CLIVAR intersection panel. She is on the advisory council for the AAAS Leshner Institute for Public Engagement.

Cobb is an advocate for outreach with communities, and regularly lectures to schools, colleges and other public groups, on climate science. She has been involved with policy and is the writer of several public interest articles on climate change, trying to inspire other climate scientists to speak up in international debate. She has appeared on Showtime's documentary "Years of Living Dangerously". On Real Scientists, Cobb makes her case for studying the paleoclimate: "The instrumental record of climate is far too short to identify some of the most important changes in climate under greenhouse forcing. Paleoclimate data is coming to the rescue, looking at past droughts, extreme events, and sea level change". Cobb gave a presentation at the March for Science in Atlanta, Georgia, in April 2017.

Diversity

At Georgia Tech, she is an ADVANCE Professor for "Institutional Diversity", part of the National Science Foundation's efforts to increase representation and advancement of women in science and engineering.