Professor Gabriel Vecchi
Professor, Geosciences Department & High Meadows Environmental Institute, Associated Faculty, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program, Director, High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, Deputy Director, Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, Princeton University
Gabriel Vecchi is Professor in the Department of Geosciences and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Since July 2021 he has been Director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute. He is also the Deputy Director of the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES), a joint institute between Princeton University and NOAA, and from July 2019 to July 2021 was its Director. Prior to coming to Princeton University in 2017, he was a Research Oceanographer and the Head of the Climate Variations and Predictability Group at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was since 2003. His research focuses on understanding short- and long-term changes to the oceans and atmosphere, including the monsoons, El Niño, and the impact of climate on tropical cyclones, weather extremes, and global patterns of rainfall and drought.
Gabriel has received a number of awards including the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the American Meteorological Society’s Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award, the Ascent Award from the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union, the Daniel L. Albritton Outstanding Science Communicator Award, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal. Gabriel was #70 in the Reuters “Hot List” of the world’s 1000 leading climate scientists and has been on the Thompson Reuters “Highly Cited Researchers” Lists from 2014 through 2021 in recognition for ranking among the top 1% of researchers for most cited documents in Geosciences over 2002-2012 through 2009-2019, respectively. Gabriel’s Ph.D. in Oceanography and M.S. in Applied Mathematics are from the University of Washington, Seattle. His undergraduate degree in Mathematics is from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Gabriel is a member of NOAA’s Climate Observing Systems Council, the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Earth System Model Scientific Steering Committee, and the U.S. National Committee for Geodesy and Geophysics at the National Academy of Sciences. Gabriel was a co-Chair of the US-CLIVAR Working Group on Hurricanes and Climate, and a Lead Author in Working Group I of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. He has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications.