Lawrence Vulis
I am a climate data scientist working on climate risk analytics at CoreLogic. Views on this personal website represent my own and not that of my employer.
In prior roles I applied statistical and data science techniques to identify and characterize patterns in the large volumes of remote sensing imagery, climate data, and in-situ observations and to relate these patterns to physical processes. This enables us to make data-based and physically-informed evaluations of landscape vulnerability and resilience. I earned a PhD in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California Irvine where my research was supported by a NASA Earth Space and Science Fellowship and a UC Laboratory Fees In-Residence Graduate Fellowship involving collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The incredible advisors who have guided my research journey include Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Alejandro Tejedor, Joel C. Rowland, and Naresh Devineni.
My PhD research focused on how permafrost influences the morphology and hydrology of arctic deltas (ADs). We are working to understand how the patterns of thermokarst lakes on these landscapes contain information on permafrost process influence on delta formation and the fate of arctic deltas under warming. Another coastal geomorphology question of interest is the quantitative characterization of river delta shorelines. Lastly, I am presently collaborating with researchers at UCI and internationally on other coastal dynamics topics including understanding why some delta channel networks have become stagnant, graph theoretic characterization of delta channel networks, and analyzing the space-time variability of Southern California's metropolitan beaches. Read more about ongoing and past research here.
A little bit about me: I am a strong believer in Free and Open Source Software and reproducible research. The above research was conducted almost entirely in R & Python and portions have been published on GitHub. One of my favorite hobbies is reading; some favorite authors, in arbitrary order, include George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Brian Fagan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Carl Sagan, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hannah Arendt, and many more. I also enjoy hiking, camping, cooking, and (reading) history.
