Robert Kopp

Robert Kopp is a climate scientist who serves at Rutgers University as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. He directs the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, a National Science Foundation-funded consortium that advances coastal climate adaptation and the scientific understanding of natural and human coastal climate dynamics. He is also a founding principal investigator of the Climate Impact Lab, a multi-institutional collaborating advancing data-driven approaches to estimating the social and human costs of climate change. He is also co-lead for engagement and applications for the NASA Sea-Level Change Team. Professor Kopp’s research focuses on past and future sea-level change, the interactions between physical climate change and the economy, the use of climate risk information to inform decision-making, and the role of higher education in supporting societal climate risk management.

His research group, the Rutgers Earth System Science & Policy Lab, also develops cyberinfrastructure to support climate hazard analysis. The Framework for Assessing Changes To Sea-level (FACTS), an open-source sea-level projection framework, supports the integration of projections for sea-level projections, including those the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report and the US Interagency Sea Level Rise Task Force. The spatiotemporal modeling framework PaleoSTeHM makes readily accessible modern techniques for reconstructing paleo-sea level and paleo-environmental fields.