n 2011 and then 2012, Emma Levin's hometown on Long Island was hit back to back with the one-two-punch succession of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. The resultant damage and flooding left the then middle-school-aged Levin out of class for weeks. In the wake of such close-to-home impacts, Levin, who had always had a knack for math and hard physical sciences as a student, suddenly found herself drawn to climate and environmental sciences.

Now a second year graduate student in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Levin has dedicated herself to research in the pursuit of an increasingly urgent question: How will hurricane activity change in a warming world? 

She’s a member of The Vecchi Research Group – run by Gabe Vecchi Princeton University Knox Taylor Professor of Geosciences, director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute and deputy director of the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System whose members past and present have helped develop detailed climate model simulations which recreate historical hurricane activity. Using these simulations to peek at hurricanes of the past, she hopes to gain crucial insight into hurricanes of the future.

“I'm going back in time to understand past hurricane fluctuations in the context of trying to determine what will be different in the future,” said Levin.