Laura Fierce

Biography

Laura Fierce is an Assistant Atmospheric Scientist in the Department of Environmental and Climate Sciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Her research focuses on developing new frameworks for simulating atmospheric aerosols in climate and air quality models. Aerosols affect the Earth’s radiative balance and, hence, climate, by scattering and absorbing solar radiation, by altering the lifetime and radiative properties of clouds, and by decreasing the reflectivity of ice and snow. These aerosol radiative effects depend on the characteristics of particles of varied size, shape, and chemical composition. Dr. Fierce is applying new computational methods to represent key particle characteristics in large-scale atmospheric models. Dr. Fierce received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (2009), M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (2011), and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (2015) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is formerly a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow.