Diane Thompson

Roles: Panelist

Diane Thompson is a Boston University Assistant Professor and head of BU’s Tropical Climate and Coral Reefs Laboratory. Diane’s research bridges the fields of ecology, paleoecology, and paleoclimatology to investigate climates and reef systems of the past.  Her work spans a range of scales from local (e.g., reef-scale circulation) to global (e.g., climate variability and change) and capitalizes on a blend of field and laboratory, observational and modeling, and experimental and theoretical approaches.  She aims to improve our understanding of tropical-climate variability through investigations of topical-climate archives, including coral, speleothem, and marine and lake sediment records.  She also aims to further investigate the stability of the coral-reef ecosystem through past climate changes.  Determining whether the changes occurring on today’s reefs are unprecedented through geological time will improve our predictions of coral-reef resilience under future global climate change.