Guilherme Luiz Torres Mendonça

Science has come to a point where we think we know many of the fundamental rules underlying our universe, from the scales of atoms and subatomic particles to those of planets, galaxies, and beyond. Yet, looking around it is easy to find a multitude of things we do clearly understand: ecosystems, the human brain, societies, our economy, the Earth and its changing climate. This is because those systems are complex: they are made up of multiple components interacting so complicatedly that even if we knew exactly what each component is doing, it would still be unclear what the whole system does. I am mainly interested in the dynamics of such systems, with focus on the Earth. My research revolves around topics relevant for the problem of climate change. In my work I have been developing and employing approaches informed by areas such as dynamical systems theory, inverse problems, and statistical physics. I received my PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and University of Hamburg for developing a method to identify response functions from data and applying it to study the dynamics of the fraction of emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere -- and thus causes climate change -- and its connection to feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. Currently I hold a position as postdoctoral scientist at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of São Paulo. Topics I am presently interested in: large-scale dynamics of the coupled climate-carbon cycle system; analysis of geophysical (atmosphere/ocean) and mechanical models, primarily in the context of renewable energy technologies; numerical methods in inverse problems. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)