Caldeira Lab

Min Chen (Visiting Investigator)

David Farnham (Postdoctoral Fellow)

David Farnham is an environmental engineer and hydroclimatologist interested in how climate affects our engineered water and energy systems. David’s work can broadly be described as the development of statistical models to estimate and/or predict climate risks at time scales ranging from daily to seasonal to multi-decadal.

With regard to water systems, David has authored papers on topics ranging from the prediction of urban water contamination, to the estimation of future regional riverine flooding hazard, to the climate drivers of seasonal precipitation variability in water scarce regions such as the Southwestern, United States.

Within energy systems, David has been focusing on weather/climate dependent renewable energy technologies; namely solar, wind, and hydro power. For example, David has recently been investigating the implications of yearly to decadal fluctuations in potential wind and solar energy supply for energy system planning.

Bill Hayes (Programmer)

Bill creates programs to analyze data from climate models for Ken Caldeira and others in his lab.
After receiving his BSEE and MSEE from the University of Cincinnati in his home town he did his first professional work developing hardware and software for a Pediatric Cardiology research lab at Duke University. After working for many small companies in California he became a Systems Engineer at Siemens Oncology in Concord before joining Carnegie
He currently resides in Las Vegas tutoring Python online in his spare time.

Manoela Romano de Orte (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Manoela Romanó de Orte is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in in the Caldeira Lab at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology. She is a marine scientist, studying the fate and the effects of pollutants in the coastal environment. Her research considers traditional pollutants, such as heavy metals, alongside emerging contaminant threats. These emerging threats include plastics and the global effects of humans dumping carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, which warms and acidifies the ocean. Manoela's latest work focuses on the response of coral reef ecosystems to climate change and to plastic pollution.