The Climate Systems Engineering initiative (CSEi) welcomes B. B. Cael, an expert in climate mitigation and global carbon cycle-climate dynamics, as a new assistant professor. Cael is the first of ten faculty members that CSEi plans to recruit by the end of the decade. He began on January 1 in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, and joins from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK.
“We are thrilled to have Cael as our first CSEi faculty hire. Even more so that he is working on both carbon removal and solar geoengineering and is an ace scientist who cares about policy,” said CSEi faculty director David Keith.
Cael will research both carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering, alongside fundamental questions about Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. He has conducted extensive climate science research, with a primary focus on climate mitigation and global carbon cycle–climate dynamics. He has also studied paleoclimate, climatic extremes, plankton ecology, turbulence, ocean circulation, climate economics, remote sensing, ocean biogeochemistry and limnology.
“This is a critical time for advancing our understanding of ways to mitigate climate change in addition to emissions reductions,” Cael said. “It’s exciting that UChicago is making this a priority, and I’m thrilled to be joining CSEi to be a part of it.”
Cael completed a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Joint Program in Oceanography in 2018. He received an A.B. in Mathematics, Human Biology and Philosophy in 2013, and a Sc.M. Applied Mathematics in 2014, from Brown University. In 2019, Cael was a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Marine Microbial Ecology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.