Dr. Xiaojing Du is an assistant professor at George Mason University, specializing in paleoclimate reconstructions, data-model comparisons, and climate modeling. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and completed postdoctoral research at Brown University and Rice University. Her research focuses on tropical hydroclimate changes and the interactions between tropical and extratropical regions, including ENSO and its teleconnections, the dynamics of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, and monsoon system behavior.

Dr. Meredith Parish is a postdoctoral research fellow at Mason, focused on using climate model simulations and paleoclimate reconstructions to diagnose the controls of tropical climate change. She received a MS studying centennial-to-millennial scale climate variability in the western US at the University of Wyoming and a PhD studying orbital-scale climate change in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool region at Brown University. Meredith is interested in understanding the forcings of climate, particularly precipitation, because of the potential to constrain how people will be impacted by future climate change. Meredith enjoys hiking, backpacking, and eating good food with her fiancé Ian and dog Tava. 

Go Sato is a second-year Ph.D. student at Mason. He completed his Bachelor's degree at the College of Geosciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan. Go is interested in the variations of ENSO and monsoon systems throughout the Holocene. Currently, he is working on a project to understand ENSO and ENSO teleconnection variations during the mid-Holocene using climate models and paleoclimate proxy records. In his free time, Go enjoys playing tennis and watching scientific mystery movies.

Tehreem is a first-year M.S. student at Mason. She recently graduated from Columbia University with a major in Climate System Science, where she participated in research on climate extremes at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia Climate School. She is interested in heat extremes, climate data, and compound events. Born and raised in Chicago, she enjoys exploring new cities, reading, coffee shops, and finding new trails to hike on!