Sonali
McDermid
Associate Professor
New York University
Sonali McDermid is an Associate Professor and climate scientist in the
Dept. of Environmental Studies at NYU, and currently serves as Editor-
in-Chief for the AMS journal Earth Interactions. Her research focuses
on both climate change impacts on agriculture and food security, and the
impacts of agriculture on the environment. She is a Climate Co-Lead for
the Agricultural Intercomparison and Improvement Project
(www.agmip.org), evaluating climate change impacts on food security across South Asia and
Sub-Saharan Africa. She is also affiliated with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
where she develops climate models to understand the impacts of land management on the climate
system. She is a recent Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2021) and Fulbright-Kalam Fellow awardee
(2020), which support her research investigating pathways for combined climate mitigation and
adaptation in agriculture. She holds a B.A. in Physics from NYU and a Ph.D. from the Dept. of
Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, focusing on Atmospheric Science
and Climatology. Prior to NYU, she was NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goddard Institute for
Space Studies in NYC.