Dan Chavas

Hello!
My lab studies how hurricanes and severe thunderstorms work in the climate system. We use what we learn to make better forecasts of these events and their risks.

News:

• We are always looking for graduate students to research extreme weather and climate. Please email Dan (dchavas@purdue.edu) for more information and/or to ask any questions. I’d love to hear about your background and interests and let you know more about myself, our group, and our department. We need to increase participation from underrepresented groups in our field at every level -- individuals from any such group are especially encouraged to reach out to Dan to learn more.
• We need to talk openly about race and racism in academia. I started writing about it, including my own personal story. Representation matters.
• Dan has recently been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure, effective August 2021!
• Dan has been awarded an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award! This is a 5-year award grant to study climate controls on the subtropical high and hurricane landfall risk, and to develop a weather and climate risk internship program to put atmospheric science graduates in positions to help use weather and climate information to make better decisions.
• I’ve made YouTube video presentations for a few recent papers -- check out the Research page.

About me:

I am currently Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science at Purdue University in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Before starting at Purdue, I was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, and I received my PhD in Atmospheric Science from MIT and B.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Applied Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Between undergrad and grad school, I studied abroad in Montpellier, France, spent a summer as a volunteer teacher in Tamale, Ghana, interned at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and worked as a research associate at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, MD while living in Washington DC. Before my post-doc I went on a beautiful 2-month road trip across the western U.S.. There's a lot outside of science that inspires me, from podcasts like Imaginary Worlds ("how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief") and 99% Invisible, and creative people like Antoni Gaudi, Donald Glover, Kishi Bashi, Andrew Bird, Lizzo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ali Wong, Dave Chappelle, Trevor Noah, Frank Lloyd Wright, Michel Gondry, Justin Willman (Magic for Humans), Anthony Bourdain (RIP), and curious children everywhere. I talk about some of this in this Climate Scientists podcast episode with Dan Jones. My wife Laura is Senior Lead Analyst at CB Insights, and we have a fearless toddler daughter Maya and infant son Sam. I'm ethnically ambiguous. A life goal of mine is to do a crossword puzzle scratch-off ticket in all 43 states that offer them.