Ariane Middel, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, was elected the seventh president of the International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC). She will serve a four-year term ending in 2026.
“We are in this climate crisis right now, and with this backdrop, the IAUC is more important than ever,” Dr. Middel said. “The organization’s work deals with how cities interact with the atmosphere and, in a way, how cities create their own climate. It’s a great honor and I feel grateful and humbled to be elected in this role.”
With more than 1,000 members worldwide, IAUC brings together a diverse community of researchers including geographers, atmospheric scientists, health scientists, architects, engineers, computer scientists, and urban planners. The association’s members advance research across key areas of urban climate, including: urban heat islands, air quality, remote sensing of surface characteristics to heat mitigation, human-biometeorology, thermal comfort, and climate modeling and observations at various scales.
“It’s a very diverse community that embraces multidisciplinarity to solve these problems that one discipline alone could never solve,” said Dr. Middel, whose research involves studying how people experience heat at micro levels. “We have these grand urban challenges and I think that positions the IAUC well to see what can be done and to find solutions to these problems.”
Dr. Middel is an assistant professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State. She joined the faculty in 2018. Previously, Dr. Middel was an assistant professor in the department of geography and urban studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Dr. Middel holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the University of Bonn in Germany. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany.