Welcome! I’m an assistant professor in Peking University’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a member of our Planetary Atmospheres group.

I originally grew up in Tanzania, Germany, and Kenya. I went on to study Physics and Philosophy at Harvard, and did a PhD in climate science and extrasolar planets at the University of Chicago. After that I was a postdoc at MIT, supported by a fellowship from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. I now work at Peking University in Beijing, China.

Why do different planets have such different climates? My work tries to explore this question from a range of angles, with a particular emphasis on the atmospheres of exoplanets and climate change on Earth. Find out more by checking out my recent publications.

News (scroll for more)

• June 2023 Still hunting for exoplanet atmospheres ... Congratulations to Sebastian Zieba for leading this study that was recently published in Nature! From simple theory papers^{a, b, c, d}, over a first test run with the Spitzer telescope^e, to now having the incredible capabilities of JWST, the search for atmospheres on roughly Earth-sized planets has been one of the most exciting research areas I've had the privilege to be involved with. In this paper, our team found that the nearby TRAPPIST-1c does not have a thick Venus-like atmosphere. Given the similar finding for the neighboring TRAPPIST-1b^f, maybe it's harder than we originally thought to find truly Earth-like planets out there?
• May 2023 The most important feedback for determining how much Earth warms under global warming is the longwave clearsky feedback. Together with Nadir Jeevanjee and Nick Lutsko, we developed a way to estimate this feedback solely using pen and paper. The paper is published here. Want to compute analytical spectral feedbacks yourself? The scripts are available on github.
• October 2022 Our Planetary Atmospheres group has open postdoc positions. Find out more here.
• August 2022 Interested in doing undergraduate research, or looking for a postdoc position? Get in touch via email (see left).
• August 2022 Interested in climate feedbacks? Check out this new preprint with Nadir Jeevanjee and Nick Lutkso. We develop an analytical model to explain both the state-dependence and spatial structure of Earth's longwave climate feedback.