Sylvia Sullivan

Biography

Sylvia received her B.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2012 and her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017. She was a postdoc at Columbia University for two years and a Young Investigator Fellow at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for another two. She started as an assistant professor at the University of Arizona in 2022.

Sylvia is interested in multiscale interactions in the atmosphere, from ice crystal nucleation and fragmentation (crystallization and attrition) at the smallest scales to mesoscale storm propagation and evolution at larger scales. The group designs benchtop experiments to understand cloud processes and runs storm-resolving models on the UA high-performance computing cluster to quantify impacts on surface rainfall rates and the atmospheric energy balance.

Group Website: sylviasullivan.github.io

Degrees

• Ph.D. Chemical Engineering
• Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• Multi-scale modeling of in-cloud ice formation
• B.S. Chemical Engineering
• California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States