Cambridge Climate Institute

Dr. Nadya Vinogradova is a climate scientist with more than 15 years of experience in the field of ocean physics. She specializes in the application of satellite and numerical oceanography to understanding and predicting the role of the ocean in climate variability, and has led broad and multidisciplinary research on a variety of topics, including changes in the Earth water cycle in the warming climate; contemporary and future changes in sea level; variability of the upper ocean heat and salt contents and their governing mechanisms; crustal deformation and gravity and their effects on redistribution of mass over the oceans. As a member of NASA science teams, she has also done extensive work on estimating uncertainties in satellite measurements of temperature and salinity for global oceans, as well as developed ocean products for regional applications. She holds a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from Dept. Marine Science, NASA Stennis Space Center [2004] and a Masters Degree in Applied Mathematics from Nizhny Novgorod State University, Russia [1999, with honors]. Dr. Vinogradova is currently a Principal Investigator on NASA Sea Level Change Team (N-SLCT) and NASA Ocean Salinity Science Team (OSST), and a member of NASA working groups and ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) group. 

Nadya is raising two young scientists with her husband in Somerville, MA.

Dr. Mark Tamisiea is geophysicist whose research aims to better understand observations of sea level, crustal deformation, gravity and rotation in terms of the changing distribution of mass over the Earth’s surface.  One of his main focus areas is present-day effect of glacial isostatic adjustment, which is motion of the Earth's crust and sea level due to ice sheet changes during the previous glacial cycles.  Understanding these effects is important not only for modeling current geodetic observations, such as data from tide gauges, GPS receivers and ocean altimetry, but also understanding the observations of higher-than-present-day sea level during the last interglacial.  He is also interested in using observations of ocean bottom pressure to better understand annual and inter-annual changes in ocean mass. Mark received his Ph.D. in Physcis from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1999.  Most recently, Mark was a Geodetic Geophysicist at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) at Liverpool and was the head of the NOC Sea Level and Ocean Climate subgroup for over two years.

Mark Shiffer is a technologist with over 20 years of software development and management experience.  He has a background in scientific modeling, having pursued his PhD at Boston University in Computational Neuroscience, as well as teaching computer science at CSULB, research in financial modeling, leading government funded proposals and algorithm development at BAE Systems, and most recently directing a software engineering group developing distributed systems working on big data in the cloud.