Resource for journalists reporting on climate change | Press Releases

Image: Shanon Reckinger Studying ocean currents is one avenue toward understanding global climate change.

For expertise on this pressing issue, please consider as a resource, Shanon M. Reckinger, Ph.D., Fairfield University’s Clare Boothe Luce Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Reckinger, who teaches in the School of Engineering, develops numerical methods to improve the accuracy and efficiency of ocean models, which are one component of the large global climate models needed to help comprehend how and why climate is changing.

Assistant Professor Reckinger is working on a project with the Climate, Ocean, and Sea Ice Modeling group at Los Alamos National Lab, which is developing advanced ocean and sea ice models that contribute to the global climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Her graduate work involved using advanced numerical techniques to solve the shallow water equations, which can simulate western boundary currents (like the Gulf Stream) and tsunamis.

A native of Omaha, Nebraska, she earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She joined the Fairfield faculty as part of a growing institutional commitment to promoting women in science.