Future Teaching Interests
If/when I have the opportunity to teach again at a university or college, I would be most interested in teaching several types of courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels:
1) interdisciplinary climate and society – broad overview course
2) climate/sector specific courses (particularly regarding public health, humanitarian response, energy systems, water management, agriculture/food security, and climate adaptation finance/insurance)
3) specialized courses in climate science and natural hazards – these could be broad overview courses or deeper dives into specific hazards and could include some elements of policy and disaster response, as well as climate science
4) quantitative/statistical analysis methods (with emphases on seasonal forecasting and validation, extreme event analysis and statistical analysis of climate model output for scenario development)
Most Recent Experience
In the fall of 2024, I was a teaching assistant for a course in Climate Dynamics that is part of the core curriculum of the MA program in Climate and Society at Columbia University Climate School. The course was co-taught by Professors Mingfang Ting and Michela Biasutti and covered the foundations of atmospheric radiation, the influence of GHGs, the dynamics of the ocean and atmosphere, coupled oscillations, the carbon cycle and projections of climate change. There were 65 students in the section for which I was a TA (and 120 students total in the 2025 MA cohort) and they came up with some very creative final projects. It was a pleasure to be their TA.
I have also been a tutor for the SAT, GRE and academic STEM subjects with IvyBound over the last two years.
Past Experience
IRI: Towards the end of my employment at IRI, I was involved with developing a curriculum for climate risk management for agricultural extension specialists in Ethiopia, along with climate scientist Sylwia Trzaska, climate data scientist Tufa Dinku, agriculture expert James Hansen, climate and agriculture specialist Gloriose Nsengiyumva and climate project coordinator Amanda Grossi. The links for these reports are shown below.
Climate Risk Management for Agricultural Extension (CRMAE) Reference Guide 2023
CRMAE Facilitator’s Guide 2023
Climate Risk Management in Agriculture (CRMA) Short Course Reference Guide 2022
I was also an external advisor on two Master of Science theses written by young adult meteorologists from Rwanda – work has also led to some jointly published peer-reviewed work and productive collaboration. It was a pleasure to collaborate with and train these meteorologists.
From 2016-2022, I conducted about 20 trainings of international partners (mostly meteorologists at various African national meteorological services). Some of this was in person in Africa and Asia (pre-pandemic 2016-2019), and some was remote via Zoom (during and after the pandemic). Much of the pandemic era training material is available on IRI’s wikipage regarding trainings:
https://wiki.iri.columbia.edu/index.php?n=NextGen.Trainings
Most of this training was in English, but some was in French for West African partners. More detail on all the trainings is in my CV. I wrote training reports regarding my earlier forecasting trainings in Rwanda. The links are shown below:
Siebert and Rose 2018, Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
Siebert, Kagabo, and Vuguziga, 2017, CGIAR
Siebert, Kagabo, Vuguziga, 2016, CGIAR
PhD and before: As a PhD student at Rutgers from 2010 to 2014, I did a lot of TAing and teaching.
In academic year 2013-2014, I taught expository writing in the fall semester and course on Climate and Society that I developed in the spring term. I spent about a third of the course on climate science, about two weeks on energy science, about two weeks on international climate policy (both adaptation and mitigation), and another four weeks on climate sector impacts (agriculture, water, energy, public health, urban and coastal vulnerability). I really enjoyed the experience of developing and teaching this course and had some excellent students. The syllabus and lectures are at the bottom of the page. Note that if I were to teach an analogous course now, almost a decade later, there would be substantial changes – particularly to the discourse on policy, impacts, and energy technology.
In the academic years 2010-2013, I was a TA for large introductory geography courses on physical geography (Earth Systems) and nature-society geography (Transforming the Global Environment). During the summers of 2011 and 2012, I taught Earth Systems in compressed summer semesters. The academic year courses were very large (hundreds of students each semester) and my role was mostly to grade and hold office hours. But the summer courses were much smaller (about 25 students each term).
Also from 2009-2014, I was an SAT and GRE tutor with the company IvyBound. As mentioned above, I have returned to working with IvyBound over the last year.
In 2009 and 2010, I was a TA for the Regional Climate Dynamics and Impacts course at Columbia University’s MA program in Climate and Society. It was an honor and a privilege to be a TA in that context with some really excellent graduate students who had interesting and varied life experiences – many of whom have done really interesting and impressive things with their careers since that time.
Climate and Society Course
asclimateservices.org 