The graduate qualifying exam, which evaluates how much a graduate student has learned in their PhD coursework, is an important rite of passage in the course of a PhD. Alexander James, who joined the lab in the height of the pandemic (Fall 2020), passed his quals with flying colors yesterday. We are so proud of him, and he got honored by thoughtful decorations and tasty treats from his equally stellar office mate Jordan.



Alex has a few cool projects in the pipeline, for which you might want to keep an eye out, including:

  • Laplacian eigenmaps as a way to diagnose changes in hydroclimate regimes over the Holocene
  • a taxonomy of abrupt climate events
  • Ammonyte, a Python package designed for conducting non-linear time series analysis of paleoclimate data