User:Samaraharis/sandbox

= Aradhna Tripati = Aradhna Tripati is an internationally-renowned geoscientist and climate scientist and advocate for diversity. She is the director of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science and a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she is part of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences , the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences , and the California Nanosystems Institute. Her research includes advancing new chemical tracers for the study of environmental processes, and studying the history of climate change and Earth systems, and she is internationally recognized for her research on climate change and clumped isotope geochemistry. She studies the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the impacts on temperature, the water cycle, glaciers and ice sheets, and oceanic pH. She has published extensively and there are over 60 publications of her work, which has been published in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Tripati engages in activism to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences and in the workforce, with a particular focus on addressing the underrepresentation of women, people of color, and other minorities in geoscience, environmental science, and other STEM fields. At the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, her goal is to develop a diverse cohort of community-minded scientists with expertise in climate, environmental science, green chemistry, and green engineering who will become the leaders in science, business, policy, and education for the years to come. As of 2017, she has mentored over 130 early career scientists in total.

Professor Tripati has been awarded for her contributions to research, teaching, and service, including by President Barack Obama and the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy with a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Early Life and Education
Born in Texas, she moved to California at age three with her parents, who had emigrated to the United States from the Fiji Islands. She has one sister. Professor Tripati went to elementary school and junior high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Her academic potential was recognized early and at age 12 she enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles as a full-time student through their Early Entrance Program. Professor Tripati cites reading books about the female scientists Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey as early role models who ultimately influenced the course of her career.

Professor Tripati holds a B.S. in Geology from California State University, Los Angeles where she received several awards including the Aaron Waters Award for outstanding senior. She received her Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2002 where she received the 1999 Aaron Waters Award for best dissertation proposal in her department and became a Schlanger Ocean Drilling graduate fellow in 2004. Professor Tripati also received a Gates Millennium Scholarship in 2000 that was instrumental in supporting her to complete her graduate studies.

Professor Tripati began her postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge with a Marshall Sherfield Postdoctoral Fellowship. Over the next eight years as an independent researcher, Tripati received several fellowships: the Comer Abrupt Climate Change Fellowship, the Thomas Neville Research Fellowship in Natural Science at Magdalene College, and a UK National Environmental Research Council (NERC) Fellowship. She also was a visiting scientist at the California Institute of Technology from 2007-2012.

Academia
In 2009, Professor Tripati became an assistant professor at UCLA, where she continues to teach full-time today. She has joint appointments in the Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences and Earth, Planetary, & Space Sciences departments and the Institutes of Geophysics & Planetary Physics and Environment & Sustainability. She founded and directs the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science at UCLA.

Professor Tripati has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Western Brittany, and at the State Natural History Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen.

Research
Professor Tripati has established a leading clumped isotope laboratory at the frontiers of multiple fields, and is also known for her insights into the dynamics of past climate change over a range of timescales, from the last ice age to deep in Earth’s history. The primary geochemical method she works with is clumped isotope thermometry and her work has led to advancements of its use in the field. Her research lab at UCLA is one of the few labs in the country who uses this method as a tool for geological research to study climate change on land and in the oceans in concert with climate model analysis.

Since she was an undergraduate student, Professor Tripati has been working on advancing and utilizing state-of-the-art geochemical methods to understand Earth's climate evolution. Over the course of her career, she has applied these methods to better understand the history and patterns of changes in Earth’s temperature, carbon cycling, pH, ice volume, and hydrology. She has conducted research in fields as diverse as clumped isotope geochemistry, marine geochemistry, climate science, biogeochemistry, and geobiology. Some of her research involves fieldwork in the western and midwestern US, central China, southern England, Italy, Arctic Svalbard, Antarctica, and the tropical Pacific.

Activism
Professor Tripati advocates for increased diversity in the workforce and in STEM, and uses a range of approaches to actively counter social biases in STEM fields. She advocates for a broad range of underrepresented groups, including people who are first-generation, immigrant, low-income, mature, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA, disabled, single parent. Professor Tripati has developed, organized and participated in programs to engage and support people who are women, minorities, or from other underrepresented groups. Her lab group is very diverse and engages in outreach to a broad range of groups.

She created the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science at UCLA. She also created a program to prepare diverse students for graduate careers in geoscience or chemistry; organized and wrote a grant proposal that funded a career development workshop for women and minorities at American Geophysical Union (AGU) ; and served as faculty lead for a program aimed at increasing transfers from community colleges to UCLA. In her research lab, Professor Tripati recruits from a diverse range of backgrounds and disciplines and offering mentorship to students. She is involved in the Minorities Striving and Pursuing Higher Education Degrees in Earth System Science group and was a Goldschmidt Geochemistry Society Mentor.

Professor Tripati is also passionate about engaging youth in the sciences and is heavily involved in K-12 outreach programs. She works with high school students and teachers on research projects ; and she implements an annual project in her UCLA general education oceanography class where students must create educational content for K-12 science teachers. She also co-developed UCLA Mindshare, a public outreach, festival-style event to promote interest in the physical sciences. She appeared in a sketch on Jimmy Kimmel that discussed the consensus on human-induced climate change arising from greenhouse gas emissions.

The Trump Presidency and its goals of reducing America’s leadership in climate science and environmental science, reducing funding for a range of federal agencies working in these areas, skepticism towards climate change , and its violent and divisive rhetoric, have galvanized Professor Tripati to work harder in her field. Due to the 2017 rise in both climate change skepticism and hate crimes against minorities, Professor Tripati has funneled her extra time into creating UCLA programming that promotes climate and environmental science literacy and leadership, supports marginalized groups, combats sexism and racism and other forms of bigotry, and promotes civil inter-group diaogue.

She is on the advisory board for 500 Women Scientists, has established two peer mentoring groups on Facebook: Equity and Inclusion in Geoscience and Environmental Science, and the Society for Difficult Women. She also co-wrote a letter to Science and AAAS about damaging stereotypes in science that garnered 600+ signatures and prompted a discussion on what can be done to support diversity in STEM, and responded to academics and media outlets on subject.

Awards and Honors

 * Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) from President Obama’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2017 announcement)
 * Fellow, Geological Society of America (2017)
 * Bromery Award, Geological Society of America (2017)
 * US National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow (2015)
 * Chair International D'Excellence in Stable Isotopes and Biogeochemistry, LabexMER, European Institute of Marine Sciences (2015-2018)
 * E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science - on the role of carbon dioxide in climate change (2014)
 * NSF CAREER Award (2014-2018)
 * Vasa Cube Awardee for UCLA’s Fiat Lux Freshman Seminar program (2013, 2016)
 * Hellman Fellowship (2012-2013)
 * UCLA Career Development Award (2012)
 * UK National Environmental Research Council (NERC) Fellowship (2006-2010)
 * Thomas Nevile Fellowship in Natural Sciences, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge (2006-2010)
 * Comer Abrupt Climate Change Fellowship (2003-2005)
 * Wolfson College Visiting Fellowship, University of Cambridge (2002-2004)
 * Gates Millennium Scholar (2000-2002)
 * Gretchen L. Blechschmidt Award from Geological Society of America (2000)
 * UC Regents Fellowship (1996-1997)
 * University Early Entrance Program (1992-1994)

Talks and Lectures
Professor Tripati has given speeches around the world about her research and on how to effectively promote diversity in the sciences and in the workforce. She has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers and 200 conference abstracts. She has given over 50 invited talks at universities and research institutes, three keynote lectures at international meetings, and over a dozen invited talks.