PAGES’ new Executive Director
Marie-France comes to the Executive Director role at PAGES from Belgium, where she has recently been working on the importance of modeling the Northern Hemisphere’s melting ice sheets at the beginning of the Last Interglacial period.
Originally trained in mathematics, she earned her PhD in Physics at the Université catholique de Louvain. Her research background is related to computing the long-term evolution of climate and the impact of orbital forcing and insolation on climate (i.e. testing the Milankovitch theory).
As a postdoctoral researcher, she expanded her knowledge of proxy data through research visits to the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (Gif-S-Yvette, France), the Godwin Laboratory (University of Cambridge, UK), the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l'Environnement (Grenoble, France), and l’Université BORDEAUX 1 (Bordeaux, France).
In recent years, her primary focus has been on climate modeling, using Earth system models of intermediate complexity (EMIC). The purpose of her research was to better explain how changes in the Earth’s orbital and rotational parameters could induce long-term climatic changes. Initially, she focused on the role of different forcings and feedbacks on climate over the last few hundred thousand years, and later, on specific Quaternary interglacials: MIS11, the Last Interglacial, and the Holocene. She also analyzed proxy data (from land, ocean, lake or ice) to determine whether they recorded orbitally-induced climatic changes and combined it with modeling in order to better understand climatic changes.
Using the EMIC models and knowledge gained in past climate experiments, Marie-France projected future climate states and explored analogies between past climates and our current or near-future climate states. Analyzing different CO2 forcing scenarios, she tried to explain the relative roles of 'natural' and anthropogenically-perturbed conditions.
In addition, she has held positions as Co-Chief Editor on the open-access journal Climate of the Past and as Treasurer of INQUA.
Marie-France will be attending the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December and would be delighted to chat with PAGES community members also attending, contact her at: http://www.pastglobalchanges.org/about/structure/international-project-office/mf-loutre