Professor Erwan Monier
Climate and Environmental Scientist
I am an environmental and climate scientist studying global environmental change and the interactions between climate, ecosystems, and society. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at the University of California, Davis, and co-director of the UC Davis Climate Adaptation Research Center.
Research
My research seeks to understand how global environmental change propagates through natural and human systems, the risks it creates, and how societies and ecosystems can adapt.
I combine climate and Earth system science, process-based modeling, data science, observational analysis, and impact assessment to investigate environmental change across scales. Building on my background in climate modeling and climate-change uncertainty, my research has expanded to examine how environmental stressors affect terrestrial and marine ecosystems, agriculture and water resources, wildfire and biogeochemical cycles, air quality, and human health.
Across these applications, the underlying scientific questions are closely connected: How is the Earth system changing? How do those changes propagate through ecosystems and society? How can we quantify the resulting risks and identify effective adaptation strategies?
A major focus of my work is the development and application of quantitative modeling frameworks that connect environmental drivers with system responses, uncertainty, societal consequences, and adaptation. This includes research using terrestrial ecosystem models such as GDSTEM, crop and water modeling through AquaCrop, climate and Earth system models like E3SM, and empirical and statistical approaches using large observational datasets.
My goal is to build an integrated understanding of global environmental change that connects fundamental Earth system science with the information needed to support resilient and sustainable decisions.
Teaching
My teaching reflects the same interdisciplinary perspective as my research, with a focus on understanding interactions among climate, the environment, ecosystems, and society and on developing students’ ability to evaluate complex environmental problems using scientific evidence.
I teach the Science and Society course "Crisis in the Environment", an undergraduate general education course that examines the causes, effects and solutions to a wide range of environmental problems facing the global ecosystem and that includes an emphasis on scientific writing literacy through writing training and assessment. I also teach a graduate course on "Climate Change Science and Impacts" that provides an overview of climate change science with an emphasis on climate literacy, climate models and climate communication and that examines the impacts of climate change on various sectors of the economy and ecosystem services. I also teach an undergraduate course on "Biometeorology" that explores the dynamic interactions between atmosphere and biosphere and emphasizes the roles of weather, soils, agricultural management, and metabolism, in shaping the behavior and physiology of plants, animals, and humans. Finally, I teach the "UC Climate Resilience course, a course on Personal and Community Resilience in the Changing Climate designed to promote collective hope, empowerment, and climate action integrated within our communities where students gain invaluable resilience skills, building both inner and outer strengths.
Occasionally, I have taught an undergraduate general education course on "Severe and Unusual Weather" and a graduate group study on "Environmental Data Science". Find out more information about my teaching, including course summary, learning outcomes, and syllabus, as well as my teaching philosophy.
Leadership and Service
My academic service focuses particularly on graduate education, interdisciplinary environmental science, mentorship, and scientific community building.
At UC Davis, I have had a number of responsibilities in support of undergraduate and graduate education and mentoring. I have been the lead graduate advisor for the Atmospheric Science Graduate Group since 2020 and also served as one of the Geography Graduate Group graduate advisors. I have been the Climate Change and Air Quality track advisor for the Environmental Science and Management major since 2019. In addition, I have served on various committees including the Academic Senate Committee on Courses of Instruction (COCI), the Undergraduate Council General Education Subcommittee, and the Graduate Council Courses Subcommittee among others. I was also a founding member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee of the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources. Finally, since 2024, I have been the co-director of the UC Davis chapter of the EnvironMentors program, a science education and national college access program with a mission to mentor and motivate high school students in the sciences.
Outside the University, I have served as a co-author of the Sacramento Valley Regional Report for California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, as a facilitator in the development and maintenance of the MultiSector Dynamics Community of Practice, and as a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting Program Committee representing the Global Environmental Change section since 2015.
Education and training
Prior to joining the faculty at UC Davis, I spent nine years as a researcher at MIT, where my work focused on Earth system modeling, uncertainty quantification, and the impacts of climate change. I worked at the Center for Global Change Science, which is now the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, and had secondary affiliations with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab. Before joining MIT, I received a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science at UC Davis and obtained a M.Eng. in Hydraulics and Fluid Mechanics at the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, ENSEEIHT.
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