Kim Cobb

Kim Cobb was born on 1974 in Madison, Virginia, US. She grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She became interested in oceanography after attending a summer school at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts. She studied biology and geology at Yale University, where she became increasingly aware of the anthropogenic causes of climate change. She moved off her original pre-med track and applied for a summer program at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, graduating in 1996. Cobb completed her PhD in oceanography at the Scripps Institute in 2002, hunting El Niño events in a sediment core from Santa Barbara. She spent two years as a post doc at Caltech before joining Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in 2004. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications in major journals. She became a professor in 2015 and supervises several PhD and MSc students.

Kim Cobb's group is on a mission to understand global climate change and identify the natural and anthropogenic causes. Cobb's research has taken her on several oceanographic voyages around the tropical Pacific and caving expeditions of the rainforests of Borneo. She focusses on corals and cave stalagmites, focussing on those from the last few centuries. Her group generates high-resolution records of the samples it collects, monitoring climate variability, creating models, and characterising variability in the Pacific and Borneo. She and her team collected ancient coral fragments from the islands of Kiribati and Palmyra, aged them with uranium–thorium dating and then used the oxygen isotope ratio cycle to measure the intensity of El Niño events over the last 7,000 years. Cobb is on the editorial board of Geophysical Review Letters.

Since the beginning of her career, Cobb has received several awards.

• In 2007, she won the NSF career award and the Georgia Tech Education Partnership Award
• In 2008, Cobb was recognised as one of the nation's top young scientists, winning the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
• In 2009, Cobb received a Kavli 'Frontiers of Science' Fellowship
• In 2010, Cobb won the EAS Undergraduate Research Mentor Award and Poptech Science and Public Leadership Fellowship
• Cobb was an invited guest at the White House Workplace Flexibility Policies Event in 2011

Cobb sits on the American Association of Advancement of Science Climate Science Panel, the international CLIVAR Pacific Panel and the international PAGES-CLIVAR intersection panel. She is on the advisory council for the AAAS Leshner Institute for Public Engagement.

Cobb is committed to the clear and frequent communication of climate science. She is an advocate for outreach with communities, and regularly lectures to schools, colleges and other public groups. She is has been involved with policy and is the writer of several public interest articles on climate change, trying to inspire other climate scientists to speak up in international debate. She has appeared on Showtime's documentary "Years of Living Dangerously", which has won several Emmy awards. On Real Scientists, Cobb makes her case for studying the paleoclimate: "The instrumental record of climate is far too short to identify some of the most important changes in climate under greenhouse forcing. Paleoclimate data is coming to the rescue, looking at past droughts, extreme events, and sea level change". Cobb gave a presentation at the March for Science in Atlanta, Georgia, in April 2017.

Cobb acted as a science writer at the Gender Summit in 2013. At Georgia Tech, she is an ADVANCE Professor for "Institutional Diversity", part of the National Science Foundation's efforts to increase representation and advancement of women in science and engineering.

In 2017, she started cycling to work to save carbon dioxide emissions from using gasoline. She found that this makes her healthier and happier too and so is a keen advocate of cycling.