Peterson Faina, Ph.D.

Peterson Faina is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Postdoctoral Research Program of Columbia University’s Climate School. He received his Ph.D. in June 2023 at the University of Antananarivo Madagascar in collaboration with Geosciences and Anthropology departments at the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) Amherst. Since 2014 he has worked with a team of paleoclimatologists, paleontologists, and biogeochemists from UMASS Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to understand the mechanisms that cause climate change and to reconstruct Madagascar’s recent climate history and its effects on environments, large endemic vertebrates, and people. For his Postdoc appointment, Peterson is studying how climate change impacts habitat, resource utilization and food security in Madagascar. He hopes to disentangle the impacts of human activity and climate, and to reveal the impacts of changes in resource availability (food resources) on people in southwest and central Madagascar.