Expert Addresses Current Climate Science and Vermont’s Climate Change Progress
BENNINGTON, VT— At 8:00 pm Thursday, May 2, Professor Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux from the Department of Geography and Geosciences at the University of Vermont, will give a lecture covering the latest climate change science coming out of the 2023 National Climate Assessment and the implementation of Vermont’s first ever Climate Action Plan, which was adopted in December 2021. The event, this year’s Robert H. Woodworth Lecture in the Sciences, is free and open to the public. It is scheduled for the Tishman Lecture Hall, which is labeled #3 on the campus map.
“I expect this lecture to be of great interest to a wide audience,” said Tim Schroeder, the geology faculty member at Bennington College who is organizing the lecture. “Climate change affects us all, and knowing the science and what Vermont is doing to combat climate change is vitally important.”
Dr. Dupigny-Giroux's talk is called, “On the Cutting Edge: Lessons from the 5th National Climate Assessment and the Vermont Climate Action Plan.”
An applied climatologist by training, Dr. Dupigny-Giroux's research interests intersect a number of interdisciplinary fields within the context of our changing climate, including hydroclimatic natural hazards, climate literacy, geospatial climate, and land-surface processes. She is an expert in floods, droughts, and severe weather and the ways in which these affect Vermont's landscape and people.
Dr. Dupigny-Giroux teaches introductory and intermediate-level courses in climatology, physical geography, and remote sensing. Her advanced level capstone seminars delve into Climatology and Natural Hazards, as well as Satellite Climatology and Land-Surfaces Processes. Many of her courses are Service-Learning collaborations with State Agencies in Vermont and Federal entities such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In addition, Dr. Dupigny-Giroux has served as the Vermont State Climatologist since 1997, and is the immediate past President of the American Association of State Climatologists. In 2020, she was appointed by the Vermont House of Representatives to the Vermont Climate Council as the member with expertise in climate change science. She is the lead editor of historical climate variability and impacts in North America, the first monograph to deal with the use of documentary and other ancillary records for analyzing climate variability and change in the North American context.
Dr. Dupigny-Giroux holds a BSc in Physical Geography and Development Studies from the University of Toronto (1989), an MSc (1992) in Climatology and Hydrology, and a PhD (1996) in Climatology and Geographic Information Systems from McGill University.
Established in 1988 by former students, the Robert H. Woodworth Science Lecture Series honors a longtime Bennington biology faculty member and pioneer in the development of time-lapse photography.
About Bennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college in southwestern Vermont that distinguished itself early as a vanguard institution within American higher education. It was the first to include the visual and performing arts in a liberal arts education and to integrate work in the classroom with work in the field. To this day, Bennington stands apart in requiring that every student get a job, complete an internship, or pursue an entrepreneurial experience each year. Bennington students work intensively with faculty to forge individual educational paths around their driving questions and interests. The College graduates small classes of tested students, regardless of chosen field, who are notably confident in their capacity to engage and succeed in the world. For additional information, visit www.bennington.edu.