Peter Huybers (born 1974) is an American climate scientist, and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Life and work

Peter Huybers received a B.S. in physics in 1996 from the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a Ph.D. in climate chemistry and physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. He was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change in the Geology and Geophysics Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 2004-2006. Huybers has multiple research interests related to climate science. First, Huybers is investigating the long-term climate cycles. He has advanced the hypothesis that a 41,000 year period of change connected to the Earth's tilt on its axis is dominant during the past 800,000 years, and that every second or third of these cycles produce a major deglaciation event. This deglaciation also appears to trigger changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, perhaps in part coming from radically increased volcanic activity during deglaciation. Second, he is studying annual temperature variations. Finally, Huybers is developing models to estimate historic temperatures based on the limited evidence available to us. Huybers has published in ''Science'', ''Nature'', ''Geophysical Research Letters'', ''Quaternary Science Reviews'', ''Paleoceanography'', ''Climate of the Past'' and the ''Journal of Physical Oceanography''. After completing West Point, his military career included leading a tank platoon as part of peacekeeping operations in

Bosnia Bosnia and Herzegovina ( sh, / , ), abbreviated BiH () or B&H, sometimes called Bosnia–Herzegovina and often known informally as Bosnia, is a country at the crossroads of south and southeast Europe, located in the Balkans. Bosnia and He ...

and testing technologies to reduce friendly fire at the Mounted Warfare Testbed at

Fort Knox Fort Knox is a United States Army installation in Kentucky, south of Louisville and north of Elizabethtown. It is adjacent to the United States Bullion Depository, which is used to house a large portion of the United States' official gold res ...

, Kentucky. Huybers is married to Downing Lu, a military physician assigned to the pediatric intensive care unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Awards

He is the recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 2009, the AGU

James B. Macelwane Medal The James B. Macelwane Medal is awarded annually by the American Geophysical Union to three to five early career scientists (no more than 10 years beyond having received their Ph.D.). It is named after James B. Macelwane, a Jesuit priest and one of ...

in 2009, a Harvard University Center for the Environment Fellowship in 2005, the MIT Carl-Gustaf Rossby Prize in 2004, and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship in 2001.

References

External links

Peter Huybers: ‘Ice ages are the outstanding mystery in Earth sciences’
{{DEFAULTSORT:Huybers, Peter 1974 births Living people American climatologists United States Military Academy alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Harvard University faculty MacArthur Fellows