Climate, Oceans, and Paleo-Environments (COPE)
Overview
The Climate, Oceans, and Paleo-Environments (COPE) Laboratory is part of the graduate program in the School of Resource and Environmental Management (REM) at Simon Fraser University (SFU), located in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The overall objective for our lab is to understand changes in the earth system on geological and historical time scales. Another goal is to relate these changes to regionally important impacts, ranging from carbon cycling to extreme weather events and regional ecosystem responses. Our interdisciplinary group integrates ideas from climatology, meteorology, paleo-oceanography, paleo-ecology, Earth System Science and modeling, and geochemistry. The lab is led by Dr. Karen E. Kohfeld. We meet weekly to discuss our research and relevant scientific literature.
Graduate Research
Graduate students in REM can obtain Master’s or Ph.D. degrees. In our lab, student research is focused on climate change, the carbon cycle, or regional impacts of climate change. All students take a series of interdisciplinary courses in the natural and social sciences, including earth system science and global change for environmental managers, ecology, resource policy, and resource economics, along with electives that suit their particular interests such as statistics, chemical oceanography, and climatology, within or outside of REM. They conduct a master’s project or a Ph.D. thesis.
My General Guidelines for Graduate Student/Supervisor Relationship Expectations can be found here.
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(Header Images courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory)