Lisa Goddard: atmospheric and ocean scientist

Posted by Barbara on February 14, 2022 in Blog, climate change, Dame designate, feminism, Medical, Politics, women scientists, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

February 11 was the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This UN designated day aims to accelerate gender equity and improve access to and participation in science for women and girls.

While the last few decades have produced many efforts to inspire women and girls to engage in science, a gender gap remains. Women represent only 33% of researchers. They receive smaller research grants than their male colleagues. They tend to have shorter, less well-paid careers, and are less likely to have their work published in high-profile scientific journals.

This is particularly true in the field of climate science, and doubly concerning, as women around the world will bear the brunt of climate change impacts. I would like to pay tribute to one woman expert in this field who sadly died in January aged 55: atmospheric and ocean scientist Lisa Goddard.

Goddard was at the forefront of developing methods to forecast regional climate trends from several weeks to several years ahead. She worked at understanding the interplay of short-term natural variability with long-term climate change. Based at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), where she was Director from 2012-2020, she worked with governments and non-profit organisations in dozens of developing countries to apply these increasingly sophisticated forecasts to practical decisions in agriculture, public health, emergency planning and energy production. Her work extended to bolstering the climate expertise of scientists in many countries, and their ability to advise government authorities.

Goddard studied Physics at University and went on to do a Ph.D at Princeton University at a time when news about the ozone hole and global warming was beginning to be understood; in the 1980s, women in the earth sciences were extremely rare; Goddard was the only female in her year’s cohort at Princeton. She later said being a rarity bestowed an advantage, because as long as she asserted herself, professors and others tended to remember her more than they did her average male colleagues. She wrote her thesis on the interdependent ocean and air dynamics driving the El Niño-La Niña cycles and went on to become a widely recognized expert on the subject.

In the early 2000s, Goddard helped design Columbia’s MA in Climate and Society programme. The interdisciplinary degree is aimed at turning out graduates who can apply training in both physical and social sciences to real-world problems. For many years, she taught the foundational course in the dynamics of climate variability and change, often to students with little previous grounding in the physical sciences.

In 2017, Goddard and colleagues led the launch of a major effort with the newly formed Columbia World Projects to bolster food security in six densely populated countries that are particularly vulnerable to both natural climate variability and long-term climate change: Ethiopia, Senegal, Colombia, Guatemala, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Together, those nations comprise nearly 500 million people who face recurring climate-related threats to their food security and economies. This programme is still in progress.

Alex Halliday, Dean of the Columbia Climate School, said of Goddard: ‘Her contributions to our understanding of climate were important, but her commitment to ensuring that climate information was accessible and meaningful to decision makers across the globe was game-changing,’