Tracking Tropospheric Sulphur

Dr. Colleen Golja received her PhD in 2022 from the Harvard University Department of
Engineering and Applied Sciences supervised by Prof. David Keith. Her dissertation
work explored aerosol microphysics related to proposed stratospheric aerosol injection
(SAI) strategies. In 2023, she received a Marie Sklodowska Curie (UKRI Guarantee)
Postdoctoral Fellowship and moved to the Imperial College London Department of
Physics. Her current work focuses on diagnosing the impact of stratospheric mean state
biases on estimations of the climate response to stratospheric perturbations such as
SAI, volcanic eruptions, and greenhouse gas forcing. She will soon transition to a new
role at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment as an Imperial
College Research Fellow.

Christina Last is an ARC fellow, where she tracks the impact of sulfur on climate change. Alongside this, she builds climate models using causal AI as a Machine Learning Scientist at Mila, the Quebec AI Institute. She serves as Co-Director of TipplyAI, a GenAI startup forecasting critical climate thresholds, part of ARIA’s Forecasting Tipping Points Programme. Her postgraduate degree at MIT was supported by the US-UK Fulbright Commission, where she used AI to estimate carbon emissions. She founded and scaled UNICEF's open source air pollution AI early warning system, featured at the 78th UN General Assembly and NASA. Her research has supported investigations into illegal activity and environmental pollution featured in the Guardian and the BBC.

Carla is a climate scientist who leverages machine learning to quantify aerosol impacts in the climate system and to develop novel causal discovery algorithms to study climate variability. As part of ARIA’s Forecasting Tipping Points programme, she is developing a deep learning–based early warning system for critical changes in the North Atlantic. She earned her PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Edinburgh as part of the iMIRACLI Marie Skłodowska‑Curie ITN, where her thesis focused on large‑scale aerosol effects. Prior to that, she completed both her BSc and MSc in Physics at Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg.