Heidi Cullen

Director of Climate Initiatives

Heidi Cullen is the Director of Climate Initiatives at Schmidt Sciences, where she supports interdisciplinary climate research and modeling efforts to bend the carbon curve and secure a sustainable future.

 

Prior to joining Schmidt Sciences, Heidi served as Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. From 2008-2018, she was the Chief Scientist for Climate Central—a non-profit science communication organization she helped found. Heidi was The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and was part of the team that launched Forecast Earth, an award-winning weekly climate and sustainability program. She worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research studying the dynamics of drought. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. Heidi is the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins in 2010.

 

In 2017, Heidi received the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award for her work as a science communicator. She received the 2019 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education for outstanding contributions to the advancement of defending the teaching of climate science.

 

Heidi holds a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University.