Dr. Natalie Mahowald is the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering at Cornell University in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She earned her M.S. in Natural Resource Policy at the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in Meteorology at MIT in 1996.  The focus of Natalie’s work is on natural feedbacks in the climate system, and how they responded in the past to natural climate forcings, and how they are likely to respond in the future. This includes building new parameterizations within Earth system models that couple new areas: for example aerosols and biogeochemistry, or fires within the Earth system, or the impacts of land use on aerosols and the carbon cycle. Natalie has received a number of awards and recognitions throughout her career including: American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award, American Meteorological Society Fellow, American Geophysical Union Fellow, and Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. She served as lead author on two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports: Assessment Report 5, Working Group 1 and the Special Report on 1.5°C. For her future work with AIMES, she is excited to plan workshops in the new areas requiring expertise: the high metal requirements of converting to renewable energy and the potential for adverse environmental impacts, the impact of accumulating plastics on the earth system, and better integration of social sciences within earth system science as well as building a Young Scholars network.