We are excited to announce several new leadership changes across the College of the Environment in the Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and EarthLab. 

Becky Alexander has been named chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science, where she has been serving as the interim chair since summer 2025. She is a professor in the department and previously served as the director of the Program on Climate Change.

Alexander is an atmospheric chemist who studies the pathways by which atmospheric pollutants form, how those pathways can vary across time and space, and what that means both for present-day air quality and for the future of climate change. To tackle her questions, she does extensive lab work with polar ice cores and atmospheric aerosols, using them to understand how the atmosphere has responded to climate change over the past 100,000 years. 

Phil Levin has been appointed the new director of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. In addition to being part of SMEA’s core faculty, he currently serves as the director of the Nature Record, and has previously served as lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy of Washington and the director of the National Nature Assessment within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He had also been serving as the interim executive director of EarthLab for the past year.

Levin is a conservation scientist who is interested in bridging the gaps between theory and practice and between social and natural sciences. The main focus of his work is developing interdisciplinary tools to inform conservation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.

Susan Dickerson-Lange is stepping in as the interim executive director of EarthLab. She currently is the director of the Climate Impacts Group, which is part of EarthLab, and will serve in both roles. 

Dickerson-Lange is a hydrologist and geomorphologist with experience that ranges from applied research in watershed hydrology to co-creating climate adaptation strategies with community partners. Prior to her role at the Climate Impacts Group, she was a principal hydrologist at Natural Systems Design, a Washington-based environmental consulting firm. For the last decade, Susan has worked with tribes, NGOs, agencies and municipalities, and led teams of scientists and engineers to develop and design restoration projects and resilience strategies for the benefit of communities and ecosystems.