Meghana Ranganathan is an Assistant Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Before starting at UChicago, she held a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, hosted at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Climate Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Mathematics from Swarthmore College.
Her research seeks to understand how glaciers and ice sheets respond to changes in the climate, with the ultimate goal of improving how we model ice sheet change. Currently, the large models that project future sea-level rise rely on many assumptions about ice sheet behavior, and these assumptions create a wide range of uncertainty in future sea-level change. This uncertainty makes adaptive decision-making very challenging. Her work seeks to replace those assumptions in ice sheet models with physically-driven theories and models of how ice deforms, breaks, and responds to climate across scales, from the atomic scale to the ice sheet scale. Ultimately, this work should directly improve the physical fidelity of ice sheet models and, therefore, sea-level rise projections.