Kara D. Lamb

Sen. Kara Lamb is an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, a senior researcher in the Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP) Center, and an Affiliate of the Data Science Institute. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Climate School and collaborates with researchers at NASA GISS on the NASA Digital Twins for Climate Science project. She serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on AI Applications to Environmental Science and is a member of the U.S. CLIVAR Process Study and Model Improvement Panel. 

Dr. Lamb received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Columbia, she spent four years as a research scientist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, where she contributed to several major international airborne field campaigns, including the NASA KORUS-AQ and AToM missions and the NOAA FIREX FireLab study. Dr. Lamb’s research lies at the intersection of atmospheric observations, high-resolution modeling, and scientific machine learning. Her work focuses on improving understanding of aerosol and cloud processes, and developing interpretable, physics-informed machine learning approaches to advance next-generation Earth System Models.