LEAP ALUMNI
MATTHIEU BLANKE
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
École Normale Supérieure de Paris (France)
LEAP Postdoctoral Associate, 2025-2026
- “Improving the Parameterization of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Using Physics-Informed Machine Learning”
- with LEAP PIs Sara Shamekh (New York University)
“My time at LEAP allowed me to learn about data-driven methods for climate science and interact with top-level researchers in this field. This experience is crucial for my professional path as I am going to pursue research in this field.”
LEAP Graduate Research Assistant, 2022-2026
- “Towards Robust, Reliable, and Operational Super-Parameterization Emulators”
- with LEAP PIs Pierre Gentine (Columbia University) and Mike Pritchard (UC Irvine / NVIDIA)
YUYANG DENG
AI Research Scientist
Accenture (New York)
LEAP Postdoctoral Research Scientist, 2024-2025
- “Transfer Learning for Climate Science”
- with LEAP PI Samory Kpotufe (Columbia University)
“My previous research mainly focused on core machine learning, but LEAP gave me a chance to look into how the ML technology is applied to scientific areas and broaden the scope and impact of my research. It also helped me connect with many nice people from climate science, physics and earth science. LEAP is a very friendly and inclusive community with many nice people. In addition to a research institute, it also gave me a feeling of being in a family. I wish I could spend more time with the community and those kind people.”
SAMARTH “SAMMY” AGRAWAL
Machine Learning Engineer
GenBio AI (New York)
LEAP Pangeo Intern – Data + Compute Team, 2023-2025
LEAP Research Experience for Undergraduates, 2023
- “Machine Learning (ML) to Break Deadlock in Achieving Climate Simulations with High-resolution Physics”
- with LEAP PIs Pierre Gentine (Columbia University), Mike Pritchard (UC Irvine / NVIDIA), Stephan Mandt (UC Irvine)
“LEAP has been extremely influential on me – it’s a community I highly value and a community that has been a significant aspect of my development. I want to work on innovative models of thinking about and doing science; the NSF STC model has been really great for exploring different models and structures. Doing research on innovative climate data science, brainstorming how to democratize science and put in the hands of people with KT, architecting data pipelines with DCT. I have learned so much at LEAP!”
LEAP Graduate Research Assistant, 2022-2025
- “Deep Learning-Based Inverse Modeling for Parameter Estimation”
- with LEAP PIs Vipin Kumar (University of Minnesota), Dave Lawrence (NSF NCAR)
- “Task Aware Modeling for Environmental Systems”
- with LEAP PI Vipin Kumar (University of Minnesota)
GUILLAUME BERTOLI
SNF Postdoc Mobility Fellow
Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique – IPSL (France)
LEAP Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2024-2025
- “Idealized Models of Spectroscopy for Atmospheric Modeling”
- with LEAP PIs Pierre Gentine (Columbia University), Robert Pincus (LDEO / Columbia University)
“At LEAP, I could connect daily with leading experts in climate data science. The daily discussions deeply enriched my understanding of this field of research. I felt really welcomed at the center, and it was a pleasure to spend my working days around my colleagues at LEAP.”
JERRY LIN
Postdoctoral Researcher
Boston University (Massachusetts)
LEAP Graduate Research Assistant, 2022-2025
- “Towards Robust, Reliable, and Operational Super-Parameterization Emulators”
- with LEAP PIs Mike Pritchard (NVIDIA / UC Irvine), Pierre Gentine (Columbia University)
“In addition to funding my research, LEAP has opened up high-impact opportunities for collaboration, resulting in a Datasets and Benchmarks paper (ClimSim) that won the Oustanding Paper Award at NeurIPS, a Machine Learning for Earth System Modeling (ML4ESM) Workshop at the International Conference for Machine Learning (ICML), a $50,000 Kaggle competition, and an upcoming paper in prep detailing new advancements for ClimSim resulting from that competition. I am incredibly grateful for LEAP as it was absolutely transformational for my PhD.”
MOHAMMADREZA MOUSAVI KALAN
Assistant Professor, Data Science
Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) (France)
LEAP Postdoctoral Researcher, 2023-2024
- “Transfer Learning in Outlier Detection”
- with LEAP PI Samory Kpotufe (Columbia University)
SUNGDUK YU
Principal Applied Scientist
Oracle (California)
LEAP Project Scientist, 2021-2024
- “Towards Robust, Reliable, and Operational Super-Parameterization Emulators”
- with LEAP PIs Mike Pritchard (NVIDIA / UC Irvine), Pierre Gentine (Columbia University)
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