K. Halimeda Kilbourne

Hali Kilbourne is a paleoclimatologist. Her professional training started at Smith College, where she was a Geology major and became interested in the impacts of climate change on coral reef ecosystems. She earned Master’s and PhD degrees in Oceanography from the University of South Florida where she learned how to reconstruct past climate conditions from the chemistry of coral skeletons. In her career she has conducted research at NOAA in the Climate Analysis Branch of the Earth Systems Research Laboratory and led the Environmental Policy and Science major as a professor at McDaniel College. She is now an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, where she teaches graduate courses in environmental chemistry, and climate change while running a research program dedicated to understanding the mechanisms of climate variability over the last 1000 years to improve our projections of future climate. Her academic interests are focused on the intersection between climate and ocean circulation with a particular interest in Atlantic processes, including Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. She contributed to the 2018 and 2023 Maryland Sea Level Rise reports and has been giving talks related to sea-level rise to raise awareness of the results. She participated in a National Academy of Science and Engineering Report published in 2026 scoping out a Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme events, that would help people use science to improve resilience to natural disasters, many types of which are on the rise due to climate change.