Rate My Professor Elizabeth Yankovsky

Elizabeth Yankovsky is an Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University, appointed in July 2024 within the Atmosphere, Oceans, Climate Dynamics group. She earned a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from Princeton University in 2020, with a thesis titled "Modeling & parameterizing submesoscale turbulence in dense Arctic flows," advised by Dr. Sonya Legg and conducted at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Yankovsky received her B.S. in Physics and Geophysics from the University of South Carolina Honors College in 2015, where her undergraduate thesis examined "Methane hydrates and cellular convection in the Central Aleutian Basin." Her career includes a Postdoctoral Researcher position at [C]Worthy in Boulder, Colorado (2023-2024), developing software tools for marine carbon dioxide removal, and a Postdoctoral Associate role at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (2020-2023), focusing on ocean eddies in multi-institutional projects. Earlier, as a graduate research assistant at NOAA GFDL (2015-2020), she advanced climate models related to Arctic oceanography and turbulent processes.

Yankovsky's research as a physical oceanographer and climate modeler investigates ocean turbulence—encompassing multi-scale energy transfers from large-scale winds and currents to small-scale dissipation—and its parameterization to enhance global climate model accuracy. Her work addresses influences on ocean circulation, Arctic dense water formation, and geoengineering strategies such as ocean alkalinity enhancement for carbon dioxide removal. She leads funding from the Bezos Earth Fund AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge (Phase I and II) on AI predictions for geochemical climate interventions. Key publications feature "Impulse response functions as a framework for quantifying ocean-based carbon dioxide removal" (Biogeosciences, 2025), "Backscatter parameterization of ocean mesoscale eddies informed by vertical structure" (Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 2024), "Mapping the global variation in the efficiency of ocean alkalinity enhancement for carbon dioxide removal" (Nature Climate Change, 2024, co-author), and "Parameterizing submesoscale symmetric instability and frontal mixing in dense flows along topography" (Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 2021). Awards include the 2024 Council of the American Meteorological Society Editor's Award for Journal of Physical Oceanography, 2017 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and 2011 National Merit Scholarship. She contributes editorially as Associate Editor for Journal of Physical Oceanography (2025-present) and Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation (2024-present), serves on committees like the Joint Yale Committee for Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships, and is part of the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture leadership and Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. Yankovsky supervises graduate and undergraduate students and teaches EPS 5360: Waves, Instabilities, and Turbulence (Fall 2025) and EPS 216: Global Warming: Climate Physics (Spring 2025, 2026).