About Luke

My grade school years in northern Arizona were filled with backpacking trips in the canyons and mountains of Arizona and Utah. I developed an interest in geosciences after moving to Albuquerque in middle school. My geology teacher inspired us to learn about the Earth while on outdoor trips around the Southwest, and his enthusiasm for teaching and geology was infectious. My positive outdoor learning experiences in high school fueled my interest in Earth science and motivated me to learn more about our planet when I attended college at Brown University. As an undergraduate, I became interested in reconstructing past climates using ocean, ice, and lake cores. I worked with Dr. Yongsong Huang on my senior undergraduate thesis; I learned how to isolate and analyze ancient leaf wax isotopes to reconstruct ~4,000 years of climate around a rapid cooling event (known as the '8.2ka event') in northeastern North America from sediment cores collected at Rocky Pond, Massachusetts. I also began to develop my passion for teaching while at Brown, where I volunteered as a backpacking trip leader (BOLT program) in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and served as a teaching assistant for an introductory geology class.

After college, I worked as an NAGT intern with the US Geological Survey (USGS), where I monitored ground-water contamination and implemented ground-water tracer tests on Cape Cod, MA. After working for the USGS for a year, I taught AP science, math, and Spanish at a middle and high school outside Boston, MA for five years.

I took a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) Instructor Course in the summer of 2011 and spent a few summers instructing NOLS courses in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. While leading backpacking trips, I started comparing the glaciers I could see on the landscape in the Winds to the glaciers I could see on the topographic maps from aerial photographs taken over 20 years ago. I noticed a marked difference in the extent of the glaciers on the older maps as compared to the current landscape. This experience, combined with a desire to understand more about climate that was sparked in my classroom teaching experiences, led me to decide to go back to graduate school to study drought and climate at the University of Arizona.

In 2012, I returned to the Southwest to study drought and climate with Dr. Jonathan Overpeck and Dr. Jianjun Yin at the University of Arizona. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Geosciences, I examined the history of drought variability in the Amazon, South Asia, and Southwestern North America. I participated in field expeditions in New Mexico, Nepal, Ecuador, and Peru. During my Ph.D. program, I learned how to download, analyze, and interpret the latest weather/climate observations and global climate model data. 

After graduating from the University of Arizona with a Ph.D. in Geosciences in August, 2017, I moved to Seattle to study the sources and impacts of climate variability and change in a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle funded by the Washington Research Foundation (WRF Postdoctoral Fellowship). I then worked as a research scientist and lecturer at Duke University studying climate variability and climate change impacts on human health, well-being, and the economy. I also enjoyed teaching climate change and impacts classes at the undergraduate and graduate level at Duke. I now work as a climate researcher in the Global Science team at The Nature Conservancy.

In addition to my work as a researcher, one of my other passions in life is communication about the interactions among humans, time, and the environment through photography (www.LukeParsonsPhoto.com).

I hope that my current and future research will help deepen our understanding of climate variability and change so that resource managers, policy makers, and other stakeholders can make better-informed decisions about resource management.

In the coming years, I hope to continue my work as a climate researcher, teacher, and photographer. Ultimately, I hope to continue research in the field of climate and teach about climate and earth system change at both the university level and the local community level.