Kaighin McColl
Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
kmccoll at seas dot harvard dot edu
Previously, I was a Ziff Environmental Fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. I received my PhD from MIT in 2017, where I worked with Dara Entekhabi. I have undergraduate degrees in applied mathematics and environmental engineering from the University of Melbourne in Australia (where I’m from). Outside of work, I like reading, and hanging out with my wife and our dog, Beulah.
My first name is pronounced like the surname of Elena Kagan.
Full bio: Kaighin McColl is an Assistant Professor at Harvard University, jointly appointed in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His group uses theory, models and observations to understand the terrestrial water cycle, and its connection to weather and climate over land. Prior to his appointment in 2018, he was an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2017, funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship; and received bachelor’s degrees in environmental engineering and applied mathematics from the University of Melbourne in 2009. He is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship in Earth System Science, the NSF CAREER award, and was named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences.
Past members
Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, Postdoc (with Huybers and Holbrook), February 2022-September 2023. Now faculty at UC Berkeley.
Yuanchao Fan, Postdoc, November 2019-December 2022. Now faculty at Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School.
Alexis Berg, Research Associate, July 2019-February 2022. Now faculty at the University of Montreal.
Eleanor Wiesler, Harvard undergraduate student, Spring 2023
Robert Powell, Harvard undergraduate student, July 2019-May 2021
Sarosh-Alam Ghausi, visiting PhD student from Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Spring 2023
Shiliu Chen, visiting PhD student from Tsinghua University, 2019-2020
Qing He, visiting PhD student from Tsinghua University, 2018-2019
Elida Kocharian, Harvard undergraduate student, Fall 2019
