Heidi Cullen

Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives and Director of the Information and Technology Dissemination Division at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

Heidi Cullen serves as the Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives and Director of the Information and Technology Dissemination Division at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Before joining MBARI, Cullen served as Chief Scientist for Climate Central—a non-profit science communication organization she helped found in 2008. Cullen also served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert. Prior to that, Cullen worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay.

Cullen received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and serves on the Advisory Board of the Metcalf Institute at the University of Rhode Island. Cullen also serves on the jury of the National Academies’ Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. She is the author of The Weather of the Future published by Harper Collins in 2010. In 2017, Cullen received the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Award for her work as a science communicator. She received the 2019 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education for outstanding contributions to the advancement of defending the teaching of climate science.