A Changing Climate, Artificial Intelligence & What We Can Predict (virtual)

Virtual Event with Captions, Free and Open to All

Join the University of Virginia’s Lifetime Learning and the Environmental Institute for an engaging discussion on how researchers leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to develop sophisticated models for predicting and forecasting the impacts of a changing climate. A panel of UVA experts and alumni, moderated by Chris Mooney, Practitioner Fellow at the Environmental Institute and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will explore the ethical and practical implications of using AI to foresee changes in our lives due to more extreme weather events and an evolving landscape.

Matt Coleman, Chief Risk Officer, The Demex Group (Col ’03 and Darden ‘11)

Matt Coleman (Col ’03 and Darden ‘11) is the Chief Risk Officer of The Demex Group. He has over 20 years of experience valuing weather risk and building risk transfer businesses. Coleman began his career at the Citadel, forecasting and valuing weather risk to support its energy trading and reinsurance investments. Next, he spent over 11 years at Nephila developing and scaling its climate investment business, with underwriting, strategic partnerships, and investor relations responsibilities. At Demex, Coleman oversees relationships with risk capacity providers that underwrite and sell the financial protection that Demex creates for global institutions. He also leads Demex’s structuring and pricing of weather risk transfer transactions.

Madhav Marathe, Professor, Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science and Executive Director and Distinguished Professor of Biocomplexity, Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia

Madhav Marathe is Professor of Computer Science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Executive Director and Distinguished Professor of Biocomplexity at the Biocomplexity Institute at the University of Virginia. His research interests are network science, national security, sustainability, epidemiology, social and economic science, and artificial intelligence. He is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Christopher Mooney, Professor of Practice and Practitioner Fellow, Environmental Institute, University of Virginia (Moderator)

Chris Mooney is Professor of Practice and Practitioner Fellow at the Environmental Institute at the University of Virginia. A journalist for over two decades, from 2014 through mid-2024, Mooney worked at the Washington Post, where his team’s data journalism project “2°C: Beyond the Limit” won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 2020. At UVA, Mooney teaches classes on environmental data journalism and environmental science communication.

Jess Reia, Assistant Professor of Data Science, School of Data Science, University of Virginia

Jess Reia is Assistant Professor of Data Science at the University of Virginia, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University. Before joining UVA, Reia was appointed Mellon Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University and BMO Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Montreal, Canada. For the past decade, Reia’s research and advocacy agenda has focused on building collaborations with government and civil society, resulting in publications in four languages and numerous policy contributions on artificial intelligence and data ethics.

UVA Lifetime Learning presents this program in partnership with UVA's Environmental Institute.

Event Venue

Online