Sonali Shukla McDermid

Sonali Shukla McDermid is a climate scientist and associate professor of environmental studies at NYU. Her research explores the role of landscapes in our climate system using a variety of models and observational datasets. She is particularly interested in the many ways that agriculture both drives and is vulnerable to global environmental change. McDermid is affiliated with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where she helps develop the land surface component of a state-of-the-art climate model. She served as climate colead for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, a pioneering effort to assess the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

A contributing author to the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, she is a recent Fulbright-Kalam Scholarship awardee for her work on climate and agriculture, and serves as the food security section editor for CABI Agriculture and Bioscience. McDermid holds a BA in physics from NYU and a masters and PhD from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. She was previously a NASA post-doctoral fellow at NASA GISS.

Her project, “Assessing Climate Mitigation, Adaptation, and Socioeconomic Co-Benefits: A Rice Case-Study,” evaluates methods of rice production that meet both climate mitigation and adaptation goals while also providing diverse cobenefits.