Colette Heald

Colette Heald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Her research interests span the topics of global atmospheric composition and chemistry, and interactions of these with the biosphere and climate system, including the study of both particles and gases in the troposphere, their sources, sinks, transformations, long range transport and environmental impacts. Using observations of the atmosphere at all scales: from ground stations, aircraft campaigns and satellite sensors with global models of chemistry and climate, she works at the intersection of modeling and observational analysis, with a strong emphasis on the integration of the two. Colette Heald received her undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University in Canada in 2000. She obtained her Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University in 2005, under the direction of Prof. Daniel J. Jacob. She was a recipient of both the Canadian NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship and the NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship. Her thesis focused on transpacific transport of pollution and the use of inverse modeling to estimate emissions from aircraft and satellite observations. She was a recipient of the NOAA Global and Climate Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, which supported her research at the University of California Berkeley from 2006 through 2007, with Prof. Allen Goldstein and Prof. Inez Fung. She became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in 2008 and moved to MIT in January of 2012.