The UW College of the Environment Symposium gave the opportunity to showcase current research from students and faculty. The Program on Climate Change featured six presenters funded by PCC philanthropic initiatives, including Climate Science Research Acceleration Fund projects awarded to T.J. Fudge, Alison Gray, and Mira Berdahl, and Graubard Fellowships awarded to John Morgan Manous, Christina Bjarvin, and Tongxin (Joyce) Cai.  Here we highlight these three graduate students and their posters.

John Morgan Manous (Earth and Space Sciences) received a Graubard Graduate Fellowship with the PCC in 2023 that enabled him to expand his dissertation research.  This poster, prepared for the College of the Environment Symposium on Dec. 1, titled “ Old ice preservation explained by 3D ice flow model in the Allan Hills Blue Ice Area, Antarctica” describes his work looking at the oldest ice found to date (>6 million years). This ice was recovered from an Antarctic blue ice area, yet it is unclear what ice flow patterns must exist for this ice to remain preserved for this long. John-Morgan shows how they create a thermo-mechanically coupled ice flow model to compare ice flow to ice core ages and reveal ice flow that stagnates near steep bed topography consistent with geophysical observations.

John Morgan Manous Poster

See the full resolution poster as a PDF: John Morgan Manous Symposium Poster

Christina Bjarvin (School of Environmental and Forest Sciences) received a Graubard Fellowship with the PCC in 2025 to support her advancement to graduation. This poster, titled “Assessing the Regional End-of-Life Impacts of Wood Waste in the United States” was prepared for the College of the Environment Symposium on Dec. 1. Christina describes her work as a life cycle assessment researcher and illustrates her focus on estimating the carbon footprint and other environmental impacts of products, buildings, and processes. In her dissertation she is evaluating the environmental impacts associated with reusing, recycling, incinerating, or landfilling construction wood waste, and comparing these impacts to the impacts of recycling or landfilling concrete and steel waste.

Tongxin (Joyce) Cai (Physical Oceanography) is a 2026 Graubard Fellow with the Program on Climate Change. Her research focuses on the California Current System. She uses 15 years of data from underwater gliders and satellite images. Joyce studies how large weather events impact the ocean’s role in the climate system. She focuses on “submesoscale fronts.” These are small but powerful water movements. These fronts are created by large ocean swirls and heavy rain events called atmospheric rivers. These movements are very important for climate science because they move heat and nutrients between the deep ocean and the surface. This vertical heat movement can be five times larger than what current models show. Her research acts as a “reality check” for climate models. Many current models miss these fronts because they do not include specific weather events like atmospheric rivers. By improving these models, her work helps create more accurate predictions of our future climate. She presented this work in a poster titled “Multi-Scale Ocean Variability in the Central California Current System”.