Joellen Louise Russell

Russell is a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. in Tucson, AZ, with joint appointments in the Departments of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, and in the Mathematics Department’s Program in Applied Mathematics. She was named as the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science in 2017.

Russell’s research explores the role of the ocean in the global climate, focusing on the Southern Ocean and the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds. She uses global climate and earth system models to simulate the climate and carbon cycle of the past, the present and the future, and develops observationally-based metrics to evaluate these simulations. Russell's work on the westerly winds led to her greatest research accomplishment so far: the creation of a new paradigm in climate science, namely that warmer climates produce stronger westerly winds. This insight solved one of the long-standing climate paradoxes, the mechanism responsible for transferring one-third of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the ocean and then back out again during our repeated glacial-interglacial cycles.

She currently serves as the Chair of the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Climate Working Group, as an Objective Leader for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s AntarcticClimate21, and on the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Earth System Model (CESM) advisory board.

Russell is one of the 14 climate scientists behind an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiff in the historic 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This amicus brief was the only one cited in this landmark decision that established that carbon dioxide is an atmospheric pollutant and that the EPA must regulate it.

Joellen Louise Russell (born 1970) is an American oceanographer and climate scientist.

Russell was born in Seattle, WA in 1970, and grew up in Kotzebue, Alaska, an Eskimo fishing village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where her father worked for the Indian Health Service. At age 12, she knew she wanted to be an oceanographer. Russell attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, received a School Year Abroad in Rennes, France, was a Radcliffe National Scholar at Harvard University where she earned an A.B. in Environmental Geoscience. She had her first research cruise to the Southern Ocean in 1994 and spent nearly a year of her graduate career at sea there before completing her PhD in Oceanography in 1999 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. She earned a JISAO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington and then spent several years as a research scientist at Princeton University and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, NJ during the preparation for the 4th Assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4). Russell became a member of the faculty of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona in 2006, and became a full professor in 2019.