Draft:Kira Rehfeld

Kira Rehfeld is a Physicist and Earth System Scientists investigating climate variability and sustainable pathways. She holds the professorship of Climatology and Biosphere at the University of Tübingen.

Biography
Kira Rehfeld was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. She holds an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI-status). She obtained a diploma degree in Physics and a Master of Science for Medical Physics (Radiotherapy) from Heidelberg University. She obtained her PhD in Theoretical Physics under the supervision of Jürgen Kurths at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research/Humboldt University of Berlin in 2013. Her dissertation focused on the statistical analysis of palaeoclimate reconstructions.

Thereafter, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research (until 2016) and spent 18 months as a DFG postdoctoral fellow at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge (UK). Since 2018 she lead an Emmy Noether young investigator group at the Heidelberg University, studying climate variability across space and time scales. In 2021 she became professor of Climatology and Biosphere at Tübingen University.

Research
Initially, her research focused primarily on studying climate variability based on observations, models and statistics to understand climate changes from the last Glacial Period until today.

Recently, her interests expanded towards evaluating and enhancing climate models, and to assess climate impacts of and on technologies for future sustainable pathways, including solar hydrogen production and carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

Awards
2021 Manfred-Fuchs Prize of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences for ‘pioneering contributions to the use of palaeoclimate data for the quantitative evaluation of climate variability in climate model simulations’

2019 Hengstberger prize for young scientists at the Heidelberg University

2018 DFG Emmy Noether Young Investigator Group