Senior Research Scientist, Lecturer, and Director of Data Science; Executive Director, Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions; Lecturer, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
Jennifer Marlon, Ph.D., is a climate science researcher and communicator with 20+ years of experience translating complex environmental data into actionable insights. She leads interdisciplinary efforts at the intersection of geospatial science, public opinion, and climate communication to inform policy, increase resilience, and drive public engagement.
Dr. Marlon holds positions as a Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC), and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions. Her interdisciplinary research examines risk and decision-making around climate change and extreme weather, as well as the physical science behind climate-wildfire interactions. She uses field work, surveys, experiments, and modeling in her research, which include projects such as the Yale Climate Opinion Maps, studies of coastal Connecticut residents’ hurricane attitudes, and heat wave risk perceptions among Americans.
Dr. Marlon developed the Global Charcoal Database, now an international collaborative effort, that houses hundreds of sediment records from lakes, soils, and oceans that are used to reconstruct past wildfires. Her early research traced the shift from climate- to human-driven fire regimes globally and has provided evidence of how wildfires respond to abrupt climate changes in the past. She has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers in journals and regularly speaks with the media about climate change, wildfires, and resilience.
A key focus of Dr. Marlon's recent work is understanding how Americans' climate beliefs are changing over time. Using large-scale panel data and nationally representative surveys, she has tracked shifts in climate opinion across all 50 US states from 2008-2020, revealing that while concern about global warming has increased nationwide, policy support varies significantly by region. Her research on the "Global Warming's Six Americas" framework demonstrates that many Americans are becoming more worried about climate change over time, with these belief changes correlating with increased support for climate policy and behavioral engagement. She also investigates the critical gap between observed and perceived risks of extreme weather events, identifying geographic "hotspots" where current and projected climate risks are high but public awareness remains low.
Dr. Marlon co-teaches "Environmental Data Visualization for Communication" in the School of the Environment and "Biology, the World, and Us" in Yale College.
Ph.D. and M.S. in Geography from the University of Oregon.