Sonali Shukla McDermid

Sonali Shukla McDermid

Climate scientist and Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU.

Team

Sonali Shukla McDermid

I am a climate scientist and Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU. My research explores the role of landscapes in our regional and global climate systems. In particular, I focus on agriculture as both a driver of global environmental change and vulnerable to it. Global agriculture must feed >9 billion people by 2050 without exceeding a “safe operating space” within the ecosystems that support it. Climate change, partly driven by agriculture itself, further complicates this endeavor. I use a variety of tools in my research, including process-based climate models, crop models, and a range of observational and remote-sensing datasets. I am also a research affiliate at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where I help develop the land surface component of the NASA GISS ModelE climate model for improved agricultural representation. I have also been recently awarded Fulbright-Kalam Fellowship (2020) and an Andrew Carnegie Scholar Fellowship (2021) to study modes for climate-smart rice production. During the past 10 years, I served as the Climate Co-Lead for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, a UKAID project investigating the impact of climate change on food security across South Asia and Africa.

Education

I hold a B.A. in Physics from NYU (2006), and an M.A. (2008), M.Phil. (2011), and Ph.D. (2012) from the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, specializing in Atmospheric and Climate Science. Prior to my appointment at NYU, I was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA GISS in NYC.

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Margaux Alfare

Margaux is a Researcher in Sonali McDermid’s lab, specializing in climate and land-use data analysis. She uses high-level programming languages (i.e. Matlab, Python) to analyze multi-dimensional geospatial datasets, perform statistical analyses, and create visuals for scientific publications. She also conducts research to examine the characteristics and carbon accounting of offset projects in India. She obtained her MA Climate and Society from Columbia University’s Climate School in 2023, and previously worked as a Community Outreach Coordinator in a homeless shelter before relocating to NYC.

Sasha Getz

Sasha is a junior at NYU Gallatin concentrating in Environmental Science, Economics, and Applied Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science. Her current research focuses on the intersection of climate variability, food security, and maternal health in rural Ghana. Sasha develops data-processing pipelines in R and Excel to clean, merge, and validate household survey datasets. She conducts both exploratory and inferential statistical analyses—including summary statistics, regression modeling, and sensitivity testing—to evaluate how climate conditions affect health and food access, with particular attention to time-use coping strategies. She also improves survey instrument reliability by performing item-response diagnostics and error-rate analyses to inform revisions in question design. Additionally, Sasha uses network analysis and systems-thinking frameworks to map interactions between climate stressors, resource access, and adaptive behavior, with the goal of informing healthcare policy responses to climate change.

Komal Sharma

Komal (she/her/hers) comes from Pune, India. Her background is in Computer Science and she worked as a Data Engineer at Citibank for 4 years. Currently, she is studying Data Science at the NYU Center for Data Science. Her long-term aspiration is to get back to the Finance world as a seasoned Data Scientist. She is a planner at heart, love to code and her research interests include Natural Language Processing, Climate Change and Social Sciences. When not glued to the computer screen, Komal likes reading books or trying her hand at still-life photography!

Ram Singh

Ram is a climate scientist and modeler specializing in uncertainty quantification in regional climate projections. His research focuses on land-atmosphere interactions, feedbacks, and responses to various climate forcings—including volcanic eruptions, greenhouse gases (GHGs), and land use and land cover (LULC) changes—as well as climate interventions, using state-of-the-art Earth system models (NASA GISS ModelE and NCAR CESM2). He is also affiliated with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where he contributes to the development of the land surface and other components of the NASA GISS ModelE climate model. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University and NASA GISS, where he studied the regional and global climate impacts of past volcanic eruptions, with a particular focus on potential links between these events and Egyptian history in antiquity. He got his Master’s and PhD degrees in atmospheric science from IIT Delhi, India.

Emma Winkley

Emma is a climate mobility researcher and policy specialist. Her current research focuses on evaluating the relationship between legal status and climate vulnerability of immigrant populations in the United States. She has also collaborated on projects through Cornell University and Antioch University considering the implications of climate-related population shifts for demographic change and community planning in receiving communities in the United States. Emma is also a consultant with the Global Centre for Climate Mobility (GCCM), supporting the Greater Caribbean Climate Mobility Initiative, which enables diverse stakeholders to translate data into action. Most recently, she led stakeholder consultations in Saint Kitts and Nevis, designed to support national planning for climate change, mobility, and immobility. Emma earned a Master’s with Distinction in International Migration and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Global Liberal Studies and Environmental Studies from New York University.

Past Lab Members