For more than 20 years, anthropologist Susan Crate has traveled to northeastern Siberia to work with a group of native horse and cattle breeders.

Crate, an assistant professor of human ecology in Mason’s Department of Environmental Science and Policy, is currently working on a project that focuses on how global climate change affects Siberian natives’ livelihood and culture.

Fluent in Russian and Sakha (the Turkic language of the Sakha people) Crate has...

Think back to your class trips to the planetarium. Remember the awe-inspiring view of all those stars and heavenly bodies projected onto the ceiling? Now imagine charting stars and celestial gases in about 40,000 nearby galaxies. That’s the responsibility facing Mason astronomer Jessica Rosenberg. She’s been creating an enormous dataset — a huge extragalactic survey — which she and her colleagues will use to help answer fundamental questions facing astronomers today. One the major...

When Jagadish Shukla talks about the weather, it’s anything but idle chitchat. A world-renowned climatologist, Shukla has helped make George Mason University a major player in climate dynamics research.

Shukla was one of the lead authors of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore.

In that same year, Shukla received the International Meteorological Organization...