Associate Professor Bronwen Konecky has won an NSF CAREER Award for her project titled “Mechanisms of Holocene Rainfall Change in the Northern Tropical Americas”. Konecky runs the Climate and Paleoclimate Laboratory in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. The lab investigates climate, water, and ecosystem variations in the Earth’s tropical regions, from the past ~150,000 years to the 21st century.

Changes in rainfall patterns are associated with disease outbreak and agricultural loss. Using leaf waxes collected from sediment cores in the Central America and northern South America region, and by analyzing earth system model simulations of rainfall changes, Konecky will reconstruct rainfall through the last 10,000 years, identify the drivers behind these changes, and investigate their relationships to broader rainfall patterns throughout the Americas and the global tropics.

In collaboration with local teachers and with WashU’s Institute for School Partnership, this research will be used to develop climate science lesson plans for Missouri middle schoolers. After piloting these lesson plans, they will be shared with other K-12 educators in the region through the Midwest Climate Collaborative’s educator network. Themes from these lesson plans will also be integrated into a new college-level climate data analysis lab that will be tailored for Wash U’s undergraduate climate science curriculum.

The National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program provides stable support at a sufficient level and duration to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding researchers and educators who effectively integrate teaching, learning and discovery.