Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently — but on…

For Ed Sarachik, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, science and art have always been complementary but equally important ingredients to an intellectually fulfilling life. When he was a physics major at Queens College in New York City, his art teacher gave him an assignment that would become a formative art experience: Spending hours…

Amy Clement, professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, loves the ocean. We are mentioning this because her research may seem to suggest otherwise: Amy has proposed bold and controversial ideas about how the role of the ocean in controlling several modes of variability of the climate system may…

Faye McNeill studies aerosols, small liquid or solid particles floating in the atmosphere. Each cubic centimeter of air contains hundreds or thousands of these particles – some of them are natural (e.g., dust from dry regions or salt from the ocean) and others are released into the air by human activity, e.g., by cars or…

This second part of the interview with Mark Cane picks up where Part I left off – at MIT, in the middle of Mark’s PhD. A major focus of the interview is the discovery that made Mark’s career, when he and his student at the time, Steve Zebiak, developed the first dynamical model that could…

Mark Cane is the center of the “family portrait” of climate scientists that are featured in this first season of Deep Convection. In recognition of his special role, we are going to cover Mark’s life in two episodes – this is Part I. Mark Cane is most famous for his seminal work on the El…

Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Columbia University and has been an Englishman in New York for more than 30 years. In this conversation, he talks about what will happen to the tropical Pacific under global warming (and why the climate models are wrong about that), about his passion for jazz and how it…

Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, “Gun Island”, takes its readers on an adventurous journey from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans to raging wildfires in Los Angeles and to a Venice that is inexorably sinking into the sea. Amitav is one of the most accomplished writers in either India or the US, the two countries in…

This is a bonus episode, thrown together quickly, as the coronavirus pandemic is evolving at such a rapid pace that predicting what it will look like in the weeks ahead is incredibly difficult. The guest is Jeff Shaman, one of the world’s experts in modeling the spread of infectious diseases. He is a professor in…

Why should we trust science? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pondered this question for years, and here she talks about the surprising answer she has come up with (hint: it’s not because of the scientific method). Naomi, a geologist by training, also talks about her time working for a mining company in Australia, the…