Rate My Professor Difei Deng

Dr. Difei Deng is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in the School of Science at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales. She joined UNSW Canberra in 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher working on tropical cyclones and extreme weather. In 2020, she became an ARC DECRA Fellow and Lecturer. She serves as an Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and is affiliated with the Bushfire Research Group at UNSW Canberra. Her research interests encompass extreme weather events and climate, numerical modelling, and atmospheric meso-scale dynamics and diagnosis, with a focus on tropical cyclone intensity, structure, and extreme rainfall processes. Fields of Research include atmospheric sciences, atmospheric dynamics, and numerical analysis.

Deng has earned notable awards such as the High Quality Research Paper Award from UNSW Australia (2018-2020), the ARC DECRA grant (2020-2023) with UNSW Canberra Faculty Matching Funds, and the AMOS Penny Whetton Lecture Award (2024). She teaches courses including Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (since 2021), Environmental Hazards (2024), and Special Topic in Physics and Oceanography 2 (2025). Key publications feature 'Rainfall Mechanisms for One of the Wettest Tropical Cyclones on Record in Australia—Oswald (2013)' (Monthly Weather Review, 2020), 'A Metric for Rainfall Asymmetry in Recurving Tropical Cyclones' (Geophysical Research Letters, 2018), 'High-Resolution Simulation of Tropical Cyclone Debbie (2017). Part I: The Inner-Core Structure and Evolution during Offshore Intensification' (Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 2023), 'The Projected Poleward Shift of Tropical Cyclogenesis at a Global Scale Under Climate Change in MRI-AGCM3.2H' (Geophysical Research Letters, 2024), and 'A New Pathway of Tropical Cyclone–Trough Interaction as Illustrated by the Over-Land Re-Intensification of Oswald (2013)' (Geophysical Research Letters, 2025). She supervises PhD and Honours students on extreme rainfall associated with tropical cyclones and offers PhD scholarships for high-achieving candidates.