Pedram HassanzadehAssociate Professor

Research Focus:

extreme weather, scientific ML, climate change, fluid dynamics

Email:

pedramh@uchicago.edu

Office:

Hinds 419

Biography

I am an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Geophysical Sciences, Committee of Computational and Applied Mathematics, and Data Science Institute. I received my Ph.D. (geophysical turbulence) and M.A. (applied mathematics) from UC Berkeley in 2013 and was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2013 to 2016. I received a CAREER Award from NSF in 2021 and a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2020.

I lead the Climate Extremes Theory and Data (CeTD) group focused on integrating theory, simulations, observations, and machine learning techniques to understand the dynamics and future changes of extreme weather events in a changing climate. I also lead the AI for Climate (AICE) Initiative, a joint program of the Data Science Institute and Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth (ICSG), which is focused on inter-disciplinary integration of AI with fundamental domain knowledge to accelerate and transform climate research with a focus on both scientific advances and societal impacts. With Michael Kremer and Amir Jina, I co-direct ICSG’s Human-centered Weather Forecasts (HCF) Initiative, which leverages the power of AI to innovate, benchmark, and democratize weather forecasts that can target what citizens on the ground need to know.

Selected Publications:

– Pathak et al., FourCastNet: A global data-driven high-resolution weather model using adaptive Fourier neural operators, 2022 (link). 

– Sun et al., Can AI weather models predict out-of-distribution gray swan tropical cyclones?, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025 (link). 

– Subel et al., Explaining the physics of transfer learning in data-driven turbulence modeling, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus, 2, 2023 (link). 

– Hassanzadeh et al., Responses of midlatitude blocks and wave amplitude to changes in the meridional temperature gradient in an idealized dry GCM, Geophysical Research Letters, 2014 (link). 

- Hassanzadeh et al., Wall to wall optimal transport, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 751, 2014 (link)

Open positions:

• Postdoctoral Scholar/Research Scientist - AI Weather Forecasting Across Scales