Hi there! My name is Charlotte, and I’m a climate science PhD candidate at Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. As a part of the extremes group, I work with Radley Horton researching the impacts of severe weather. I’m fascinated by anything related to hydroclimate, ranging from global heat waves to the daily streamflow of my hometown river, the Gatineau.
At Columbia, my work has mainly focussed on analyzing the impact of extreme heat on electricity demand, with a particular interest in the places where tradtional electricity-demand models fail. I am also researching the impact of non-temperature variables (like humidity, sunlight, or wind) on electricity demand.
Before starting my PhD, I got an MS at Dartmouth College, working with Jonathan Winter in the Applied Hydroclimatology Lab on Northeast extreme precipitaton and streamflow. Before that, I got an honours BSc at McGill University, where I spent a year working with Bernhard Lehner in the Global HydroLAB building a machine learning model to predict the probability of river intermittence. Between my Master’s and my PhD, I spent three years working for Environment and Climate Change Canada, first for Meteorological Service of Canada, then for the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.
In my free time, I love going for bike rides, swimming, hiking, reading, and writing!
News
April 2026 I was awarded the Canada Graduate Research Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada!! So excited to continue my PhD funded by my awesome home country!
April 2026 I spent a day volunteering at Columbia’s Girls’ Science Day. I got to connect with almost 100 middle-school-aged girls and talk to them about cool science!
April 2026 I passed my qualifying exams and officially became a PhD candidate! Thank you to my advisory committee for their guidance and support
January 2026 I gave an oral presentation at AMS 2026 in Houston, Texas
September 2025 I became the co-director of NENSIC, a group that runs networking activities and workshops for early-career folks in climate science
September 2025 I joined the Letters to a Pre-Scientist pen pal program
April 2025 I co-organized the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences First-Year Colloquium, a day where all the first year PhD students got to share their research with the Lamont community
January 2025 I started volunteering with Skype a Scientist, a program that connects teachers with scientists for video calls with their classes
September 2024 I moved to New York and started my PhD at Columbia!!
February 2024 I gave an invited talk to several elementary school classrooms with Exploring by the Seat of your Pants
September 2023 I switched roles and started working for Canada’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program as a data analyst
August 2023 Personal achievment - I competed in my first ever triathlon with heaps of support from my awesome family and friends!
July 2023 I started volunteering with Let’s Talk Science, a Canadian organization that brings scientists into classrooms
May 2023 Our paper looking at future precipitation changes in the Northeast was published in Climatic Change! Synopsis here
March 2023 The paper that I wrote based on my master’s work was published in JAWRA! Final revisions and proof reviews may or may not have been made on a barely-functioning hostel-common-room desktop in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Synopsis here
January 2023 I took a career break to backpack across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia!
November 2022 I visited a Canadian Coast Guard ship to learn about their AVOS (Automated Voluntary Observing Ship) weather station
August 2022 I headed up to Alert, Nunavut to drop weather monitoring buoys over the Arctic Ocean!!
November 2021 I became a Dartmouth alumni ambassador, interviewing prospective undergraduate students to help with the admissions process
September 2021 I started working for Environment and Climate Change Canada in the atmospheric monitoring division of the Meteorological Service of Canada
August 2021 I wrapped up my master’s!
June 2021 Our intermittent rivers paper was published in Nature!
May 2021 As a part of Vermont EPSCoR, I led a workshop in a local high school about weather station data
December 2020 I attended AGU online and presented my virtual poster
October 2020 I attended the Graduate Climate Conference virtually, where I presented preliminary results of my Northeast streamflow project
January 2020 I participated a science communication workshop at the University of Vermont with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science
September 2019 - I started my master’s at Dartmouth College and moved to New Hampshire!
May 2019 - I graduated from McGill and earned the David Harrigan Memorial prize for having the top grades in my program