Kara Lamb is an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, where she was an NSF and NDSEG fellow. Following her Ph.D., she was a researcher in the Chemical Sciences Division at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, where she was on the science team for the NASA KORUS-AQ and AToM aircraft campaigns and the NOAA FIREX Firelab Study, researching the sources of absorbing aerosols, their optical properties, and their direct climate effects. Her current research lies at the intersection of observations (from laboratory and field studies) and high-resolution modeling, with the goal of better understanding how aerosols and clouds impact the climate. She combines traditional process-based approaches with data science and machine learning.