STANFORD, Calif. - Cardinal men's volleyball alum Noah Diffenbaugh has been named the William Wrigley Professor at Stanford, succeeding Roz Naylor.
The Wrigley Professorship was created in 2014 to support a faculty member whose academic focus is on environment, resource and sustainability research and education.
A faculty member in the Department of Earth System Science, Diffenbaugh has chaired his department since 2023. Additionally, he serves on the Provost’s University Budget Committee and co-chaired with Arun Majumdar the committee that created a vision for what became the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Diffenbaugh also serves as the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute and the Olivier & Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Diffenbaugh is a global leader in climate science, who has increasingly focused his research on the human costs of environmental change and avenues for their mitigation. His research is motivated by the goal of understanding the physical climate processes that regulate the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and society. Among his collaborative discoveries are demonstrating the influence of historical global warming on individual extreme events and on the extent of economic inequality globally.
His course, SUSTAIN 101C: Climate 101, is a core class in the Earth Systems Program, providing an introduction to Earth's climate system, including how climate has changed in the past, how it is changing now, and how it could change in the future.
Diffenbaugh is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and a recipient of the Kaula Award and the Holton Award from AGU. He has also been a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journals Geophysical Research Letters and Environmental Research: Climate.