Rate My Professor Callum Smith

Dr Callum Smith is a Research Fellow in the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability at the University of Leeds. He holds a PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Leeds, awarded in 2023, with a thesis titled “The impacts of tropical deforestation on local and regional climate.” He also earned an MEnv in Environmental Science from the same university in 2017. His research focuses on the local and regional impacts of tropical forest loss on climate, employing satellite observations, regional and global climate models, and machine learning techniques. He is funded by the UK Met Office as part of the Climate Science for Service Partnership Brazil (CSSP-Brazil) project.

Smith has contributed to key publications on the topic, including the 2023 paper “Tropical deforestation causes large reductions in observed precipitation” published in Nature, for which he was lead author. Additional research outputs address the quantification of tropical forest rainfall generation and the effects of commodity-driven deforestation on local warming. His work examines how tropical forests influence rainfall patterns and climate interactions, providing evidence on the consequences of deforestation.