Nathan Steiger is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He works to understand and elucidate a range of climate phenomena: the extent of climate extremes, the physical mechanisms of severe droughts and pluvials, and the nature of climate variability across historic and geologic time, and the variety exoplanetary atmospheres.
Nathan majored in physics as an undergraduate, doing thesis work in theoretical quantum mechanics. In graduate school at the University of Washington he developed new methods for reconstructing past climate using data assimilation, a technique that fuses climate models with paleoclimate proxy data. He received his PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in late 2015 and came to Columbia University as a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow. Since 2020 he has been appointed at both Columbia University and Hebrew University.
