Sarah W. Cooley

My research primarily focuses on dynamic hydrologic change in the Arctic (and elsewhere) using remote sensing. I’m particularly interested in global variations in surface water storage, large-scale changes in surface water across the terrestrial pan-Arctic region and Arctic coastal change and its impact on communities. I've studied shorefast sea ice breakup, Arctic lake area dynamics, rapid lake drainage events on the Greenland Ice Sheet and pan-Arctic river ice breakup, and have conducted fieldwork in Greenland, Northern Canada and Alaska. I’m also especially interested in how new technologies and big data approaches can revolutionize our ability to observe surface water from space and have developed new methods for hydrologic remote sensing using high resolution, commercial CubeSat imagery. 

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Earth and Climate Sciences in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Prior to starting this position in July 2024, I spent three years as an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Oregon. From 2020-2021, I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University as part of the inaugural cohort of Stanford Science Fellows. I completed my PhD in March 2020 in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, where I was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. I have a BS in Geophysics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, and an MPhil in Polar Studies from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge where I was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. I am also passionate about science communication and outreach and have worked as a Geoscientist-in-the-Park at Mount Rainier National Park, leading public programs about glaciology and the impact of climate change. When I'm not in the lab or the field, I can be found running, hiking, cycling, skiing, playing piano, hanging out with my dog or cooking vegetarian food. 

A pdf of my CV can be found here, my Google Scholar profile can be found here, and my github page can be found here. On this website, I also have put together my advice (as well as my application materials) on applying to graduate school, applying for a masters at Cambridge or Oxford, applying for the NSF GRFP and applying for the Stanford Science Fellowship. Any questions? Want to collaborate? Contact me at sarah.cooley [at] duke [dot] edu.