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New Staff Appointments at CIESIN

Two new staff appointments have been made recently in CIESIN's Science Applications Division. Sylwia Trzaska, a climate scientist specializing in climate variability and change in Africa and other developing regions, has joined CIESIN as an associate research scientist, effective January 16. She is helping to lead a project on African and Latin American resilience to climate change with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Since 2002, Trzaska has worked with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). Her areas of research include sea surface variability in the Tropical Atlantic; interannual variability of climate and its sub-seasonal features and their predictability in West Africa; and variability of the dry season in West Africa and its relationship to meningococcal meningitis epidemics, with a special focus on the role of mineral dust. Trzaska holds a Ph.D in climatology from the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France.

Kimberly Peng, a former Earth Institute intern at CIESIN, has been appointed senior research staff assistant. Peng is working on the Haiti Regeneration Initiative (HRI), assisting with the data collection and analysis for the household surveys currently being conducted in the Côte Sud Initiative (CSI) region. In addition, she is supporting the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) by maintaining content for the AfSIS Web site. Peng has a B.A. in economics from the University of Maryland and an M.A. from the Earth Institute’s Program in Climate and Society.