Coastal Hazards and Climate Resilience Virtual Panel

As part of SECOORA’s 2020 Annual Meeting, SECOORA and Southeast & Caribbean Disaster Resilience Partnership (SCDRP) are teaming up to host a panel to highlight climate related forecasts, data needs related to climate resilience, and share their insights on mitigating the pressing threats of rising seas.

Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM ET

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About the Presenters

Gary Mitchum, University of South Florida

Gary Mitchum is presently a Professor of Physical Oceanography and the Associate Dean in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. He received his PhD from the Department of Oceanography at the Florida State University in 1984, and spent 11 years in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii as a member of the research faculty and the Director of the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center. He has published on a wide variety of topics in ocean physics, but his research interests primarily emphasize short-term climate variability, ranging from season-to-season changes to year-to-year changes to long-term sea level rise. Over the past decade or so he has spent a substantial amount of time advising local, regional and state decision makers and practitioners on sea level change issues.

Jan MacKinnon, Georgia Department of Natural Resources

Jan is a Program Manager and Biologist with the Georgia Coastal Management Program, housed within the Department of Natural Resources, Coastal Resources Division.  She has a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and a Master’s degree in Conservation Biology and has held various conservation related positions along the coast with private, state and federal agencies.  Jan has been with DNR for 21 years where she works with researchers, local communities, citizens and agency partners to understand and implement projects that conserve natural resources.  Jan also has a passion for teaching, spending the last 17 years teaching and mentoring coastal ecology students at the College of Coastal Georgia. 

Benjamin Kirtman, University of Miami

Professor Benjamin Kirtman received his BS in Applied Mathematics from the University of California-San Diego in 1987, and his MS and Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Maryland-College Park. From 1993-2002,Dr. Kirtman was a research scientist with the Center for Ocean-Land- Atmosphere Studies and in 2002 joined the faculty of George Mason University as a tenured Associate Professor. In 2007, Dr. Kirtman moved to the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science as a full professor of atmospheric sciences. Dr. Kirtman is the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) and the Deputy Director of UM’s Institute for Data Science and computing.  In 2008, Professor Kirtman received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland,  and in 2018 the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Robert D. Cess Distinguished Lecture in Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Atmospheric Sciences. In 2017-18 recipient of the UM Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity and was awarded the Department of Atmospheric Sciences undergraduate teaching award in 2016, 2017 and 2018. In 2018, Dr. Kirtman was elected as a Fellow in the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Kirtman has received numerous research grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, NOAA, NASA, and the Office of Naval Research, and he leads the North American Multi-Model Ensemble Prediction (NMME) Experiment. Professor Kirtman is the author and/or co-author of over 150 peer reviewed papers focused on understanding and predicting climate variability on time scales from days to decades.

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