People

Dr. Danielle Touma is a Research Assistant Professor at the UT Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin. Danielle received her BS and MS in Civil Engineering at NC State University and worked for two years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She then went on to pursue her PhD at Stanford University in Earth System Science with Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh. She did her first postdoc with Dr. Samantha Stevenson at UC Santa Barbara, and then continued her second postdoc as an ASP Postdoctoral Fellow working with Drs. Clara Deser and Jim Hurrell at NCAR and CSU.

Danielle studies the impact of climate variability and human activity on the characteristics of extreme climate events, specifically extreme fire weather and extreme precipitation. She uses observational datasets and large ensemble Earth system model simulations to quantify changes and underlying uncertainties of extreme climate events and compounding events under a warming climate. She also works with ecologists and anthropologists to understand the impacts of extreme climate events on local to regional scales and how communities adapt to and mitigate their effects.

Julia Miller is a visiting PhD student from ETH Zurich and SLF Davos in Switzerland. Together with Danielle Touma and Manuela Brunner, she works on understanding pre- and post-conditions of wildfire extremes and their drivers in Europe. In her work she uses observation and climate model data to disentangle compounding climate extreme events such as drivers of wildfires and post-fire flooding.

Tanner Johnson is a first year PhD student at The University of Texas - Austin. Originally from Hayward, Wisconsin, Tanner completed his BS in Geosciences at the University of Arizona where he researched post-fire debris flows and post-fire runoff with Dr. Luke McGuire. At the University of Arizona, Tanner won "Best Undergraduate Talk" for his work on modeling post-fire debris flows under climate change scenarios (he gave the same talk at the UTIG discussion hour). During his PhD, Tanner will be working with Dr. Danielle Touma and Dr. Joel Johnson on post-fire hydraulic hazards in a warming climate, by looking at climate extremes using a variety of methods.