Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is an accomplished atmospheric scientist who studies climate change and why it matters to us here and now. In her role as Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy Katharine is responsible for the TNC’s wider portfolio of global climate advocacy and adaptation work.Katharine has served as lead author on the Second, Third, and Fourth National Climate Assessments. She also hosts and produces the PBS Digital Series, Global Weirding, and serves on advisory committees for a broad range of organizations including the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, the Earth Science Women’s Network, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Katharine is also a remarkable communicator who has received the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet award, the American Geophysical Union’s Climate Communication Prize, the Sierra Club’s Distinguished Service award, and been named to a number of lists including Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Thinkers, FORTUNE magazine’s World’s Greatest Leaders and the United Nations Champion of the Earth in Science and Innovation.Katharine retains an academic appointment at Texas Tech University, where she is a Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law within the Department of Political Science. She has a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Toronto and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Illinois and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Colgate University and Victoria University at the University of Toronto.