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Maike Sonnewald is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis, where she leads the Computational Climate and Ocean Group (www.compClimate.com). Her research develops AI methods to reveal fundamental organizing principles governing Earth system dynamics, uncovering previously unknown mechanisms in ocean circulation, climate dynamics and marine ecosystems. By creating interpretable machine learning approaches, including equation discovery methods that extract governing physics directly from observations, she has reshaped understanding of how the global ocean operates through distinct dynamical regimes and how marine ecosystems self-organize across biological gradients.
Her work translates scientific discoveries into operational tools: methods she developed have been adopted by IPCC climate modeling centers (NOAA-GFDL, IPSL), contributed to NOAA's AI Strategic Plan (2021-2025), informed the scientific basis for New Zealand's Marine Protected Area legislation, and been cited in policy recommendations by the European Parliament and World Meteorological Organization. She has delivered over 85 invited talks to audiences ranging from the United Nations ITU to the U.S. Department of Energy, and serves as Associate Editor for the American Meteorological Society's AI for the Earth Systems journal and the Institute of Physics' ML: Earth.