About

My name is Faye M. Hendley Elgart 

I'm a fifth year PhD student in Climate Science at MIT, working with Brent Minchew and John Marshall.

I study the juncture of the cryosphere, the ocean, the atmosphere, and the solid earth. I'm interested in the past, present, and future stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds three meters of potential sea level rise as frozen ice, and has almost certainly collapsed before, as you'd need contributions from both great polar ice sheets to close the sea level budget at its highstand during the last interglacial. To the best of our observational and modeling abilities, this is what's starting to happen now. I'm working to constrain the rate of future sea level rise by bridging models and observations, remote sensing and first-principles physics, and glaciology and oceanography.

Basal melting near the grounding line (where grounded ice sheets become floating ice shelves; the triple junction where ice meets the ocean meets the solid earth) represents the single greatest source of uncertainty in projections of future sea level rise. I want to use ICESat-2 altimetry along with plate bending models to better estimate basal melt rate near the grounding line. I was selected for a NASA FINESST award to support this work which looks like it will form the bulk of my thesis. I'm also working on quantifying how variations in katabatic winds around Antarctica influence polynya dynamics and therefore Antarctic water mass formation.

I studied Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University. I'm interested in problems at many intersections: the planetary and the nanoscale, decadal to geologic time, and engineering and science. The first things I found that satisfied these conditions were astrophysics and particle physics. The next was climate science. I believe climate science has room for everyone- physicists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, materials scientists: climate science needs you and has room for you. If you're a student or an undergrad thinking that this sounds like a way to use your talents, skills, and education for good, it is: reach out.

While at Cornell, I headed mission operations for Cornell's first satellite in orbit, which was designed, built, and operated entirely by students. I also spent two years before grad school as a systems engineer, building a particle accelerator under Mass General Hospital to shoot relativistic protons at cancerous tumors. Prior to that, I spent a year teaching English in several primary schools in Amiens, France. 

I live in New York with two Ragdoll cats and their father. We got married at Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon, a proglacial lake at the outlet of Breiðamerkurjökull, a rapidly retreating marine-terminating glacier in south Iceland.