Professor Rignot is a world-renowned glaciologist who studies the effects of global climate change on polar ice sheets. He uses satellites, airborne sensors, field data and numerical models to understand the dynamics of glacier ice along the coasts of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets as well as in Alaska and Patagonia. His research has documented major acceleration of ice loss as a result of climate change, and has been widely covered by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, National Geographic and many others. 

Dr. Rignot was featured in the Emmy-winning HBO series VICE where he discussed his findings of Antarctica’s melting ice sheets and the global impact of sea level rise. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and recipient of the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. In 2014, he was named among the world’s most influential researchers in the list of Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers. Professor Rignot is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. 

In addition to his appointment at UCI, he is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he leads several NASA-funded projects.