Biography

Alex Haumann is an environmental scientist studying the polar climate of the Southern Ocean and the interaction between the ice, ocean, atmosphere, and carbon cycle. He received his B.Sc. in Geosciences (Major in Geography) at University of Basel (2009) and his M.Sc. in Physics and Climate Science (Cum Laude) at Utrecht University (2011). In 2017, Alex received his PhD (Dr.Sc.) from ETH Zurich for his thesis work on the Southern Ocean response to recent changes in surface freshwater fluxes, which was awarded with the ETH Medal and the Prix de Quervain. During his postdoc period (2018-2022) he worked at Princeton University, and collaborated in the SOCCOM, ORCHESTRA , and DEFIANT projects.

Currently, Alex is a Research Group Leader at the Alfred Wegener Institute and a Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There he leads the ERC Starting Grant project VERTEXSO (VERTical EXchange in the Southern Ocean) and the Helmholtz Young Investigator group SOS-iClimate (Southern Ocean Salinity––Isotopic Fingerprints and Impacts on Global Climate). In this work, he and his group study ocean changes in polar regions and how they are impacted by changing freshwater fluxes and the cryosphere. In particular, they investigate how changes in this system affect the surface exchange of heat and CO2 in the Southern Ocean. Gaining a robust understanding of this process and the related uncertainties is directly relevant to constraining future global climate change, allowable CO2 emissions for a given temperature target, and related sea level rise.

At the British Antarctic Survey, Alex maintains strong collaborations with the Polar Oceans team, and Prof. Michael Meredith in particular, since visiting in 2017. The joint long-term goal of this collaboration is to better understand the role of the freshwater cycle in Southern Ocean climatic changes.