Advance Awards Sustainability Category Finalist
Showing that science is an innately creative endeavour, Professor Jenni Evans has forged a brilliant career merging research fields and forging interdisciplinary partnerships to tackle complex hypotheses and society’s biggest challenges. She has investigated the impact of climate change on tropical cyclones and used machine learning and other methodologies for improving forecasts of tropical cyclones and for projecting how climate change will impact society. She has also researched the physics governing the maximum intensity a tropical cyclone can achieve and how this might change with global warming. Her science merged with art in a collaboration with a music technology professor on “sonification” of hurricanes. With a strong commitment to science communication, Jenni strives to relate her scholarship to messages that translate to action.
Professor Jenni Evans is a Professor of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). She is the Director of Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, employing faculty at the nexus of interdisciplinary research that relies on advanced computation and data sciences, and serving as a hub for high performance computing and big data research initiatives. Jenni is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and served on the AMS Council from 2005 to 2008. As Centennial President of the AMS in 2019, she led the global community committed to advancing weather, water, and climate science and service. She co-chaired the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones (Jeju Island, Republic of Korea) and has served for over 15 years as the Lead Meteorologist for the Professional Team assisting the Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology. She led the team that developed a Cyclone Phase Space, used in operational weather forecasting centers to track the evolution of tropical cyclones.
