Dr. Andrew Gillreath-Brown (he/him/his) is a Data Scientist for the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) at Yale University and a Research Associate for the Institute for Geoanthropology at the Max Planck Institute. At Yale University, the YPCCC studies how people think, feel, and act around climate change, and they partner with organizations to help them build public and political will for climate action. Andrew uses his knowledge of past culture, climate, adaptation, and sociocultural and socioenvironmental changes to inform current climate change communication.
He completed his Ph.D. at Washington State University (WSU) in Archaeology in 2022 under the direction of Dr. Tim Kohler. His dissertation focused on socioenvironmental systems, where he reconstructed past temperatures in the southwestern United States, then used that data to understand the spread of maize into and throughout the US Southwest, as well as the sociocultural implications of the Agricultural Demographic Transition. He also explored the relationships between environment and demographic changes and the use of body art and modification. Following graduation from WSU, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, where he worked on a new Holocene temperature and precipitation reconstruction for east and southeast Asia to explore the relationships between climate and rice cultivation. At Yale, he uses his statistical, computational, and climate background to create models to show the geographic variation in climate opinions and how worried people are about different types of extreme weather events. YPCCC conducts scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the underlying psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence them.