Raj Saha

Raj Saha is an Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Environmental Geophysics at Bates College. He studies a variety of natural phenomena with simple dynamical models and teaches courses on topics in climate, nonlinear dynamics, and computer science. Prior to Bates he was at the University of Minnesota and Bowdoin College as the Ed Lorenz Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mathematics of Climate Change. One of Saha’s current research projects examines soil heat conduction feedback to the stability of Arctic permafrost. Related to this, he and his students have developed environmental sensing stations that can automate data collection and transmission. He also studies oscillations in natural phenomena, such as the Dansgaard-Oeschger climate oscillations in the North Atlantic, influence of early spring sea-ice melt on plankton dynamics, and most recently the dynamics of quasi-periodic outbreaks of smallpox in the pre-vaccination era.