Lenka Novak: Learning to never introduce yourself as a climate modeler

Lenka Novak tried to avoid the title. “I never introduced myself as a climate modeler, always as a meteorologist,” says the Czech-born researcher at the California Institute of Technology. 

There was, she says, a certain “stigma” about climate modelers as more steeped in computer machinations than in the theoretical foundations of science. And there was the political thing:

“Going to social events, if I said, I’m a climate scientist, then people would start asking me, ‘Is climate change real?’” For scientists, that’s like asking if the Earth really is round. “It gets very tiresome.”

At age 30, Ms. Novak is now part of a wave of younger researchers who have been drawn into climate modeling. She is a “postdoc” at Caltech, working on the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA).

She admits she was hesitant to join the team when she was invited to Caltech three years ago after earning a doctorate in England. “It seemed high risk,” she says of the experimental project, and she was intent on producing scholarly papers to climb up the academic ladder.  

But she soon was inspired by the enthusiasm of the researchers around her, and by their boldness in trying something new.

“I’d much rather do something high risk and feel like it’s leading to something really impactful,” she says. “Before I came, I did have this niggling feeling that following the classical, traditional route of an academic wasn’t quite ‘it.’ We were all doing incremental research. There would be 10 or 20 people who would really care.

“But now, I feel that CliMA has opened a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to techniques.” She imagines a future when “everyone will be able to download an app on their phone and see the probability of, for example, flooding in their area. And they can make decisions based on that.”

Read about Ms. Novak's work on an ambitious effort to build a new climate model that could one day one day put climate prediction in the palm of your hand.