Tirthankar (TC) Chakraborty, an Earth scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), was recently selected as a 2024–2025 Levenick Resident Scholar in Sustainability Leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Chakraborty completed his PhD at the Yale School of the Environment in 2021, where his dissertation focused on aerosol-climate interactions. At the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in India, his master’s focused on the urban island heat effect which continues to be a major area of research for Chakraborty. 

At PNNL, he has established himself as a researcher with diverse skills. “I contribute to a couple of multi-institutional projects on coastal systems, where I focus on the complexities of coastal-urban interactions. Most of my time over the last year has been on improving urban representation in Earth system models using planetary-scale data-model integration,” Chakraborty said. “I am also the PNNL institutional PI for a grant to combine machine learning and remote sensing to examine disparities in heat hazards within U.S. cities and a recently funded DOE Climate Resilience Center for the city of Lowell in Massachusetts.” 

The Resident Scholar program Chakraborty was selected for is administered through the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment and the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the UIUC. 

Levenick Resident Scholars are given the exceptional opportunity to immerse themselves in the University of Illinois community while advancing their research. This collaboration also emphasizes the importance of multi-disciplinary research, education, and outreach and encourages engagement with faculty and students across campus.

“This is a huge opportunity. I’ve collaborated with Dr. Lei Zhao at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UIUC for several years. And being at the institute in person will make it easier to work on new scientific frameworks which address critical research gaps in our understanding of urban climate change,” says Chakraborty. 

Chakraborty’s three-month residency at UIUC began in September. In the coming months, he will work closely with researchers across departments at UIUC, from civil engineering to atmospheric science. He’ll also further his current research portfolio to improve urban representation in land models, part of his Department of Energy Early Career Project, and examine extreme events over coastal cities as part of the PNNL-led COMPASS-GLM and ICoM projects. 

This immersive collaboration will offer Chakraborty an invaluable chance to engage with peers outside of PNNL, aligning closely with the Laboratory’s commitment to engage with academic peers to advance scientific discovery. 

“I have two ongoing projects that both have some focus on the City of Chicago. So being this close to the city will allow a better understanding of the interesting work going on for the DOE-funded integrated field lab setup there,” he said. “I hope to also take this opportunity to interact broadly with the university community and find ways to form new individual and institutional collaborations covering many of my and PNNL's research priorities.”