Nathan Geldner, Ph.D., is focused on the design and analysis of probabilistic, statistical, and simulation models of environmental risk with applications in public policy and decision support under uncertainty. His experience is principally in surge and wave-driven as well as compound flooding from tropical cyclones, but he’s also interested in application domains ranging from more directly related climate and meteorological hazards such as inland pluvial flooding and water resource management to more diverse areas such as environmental health, emissions policy, and ecological management.

Geldner’s previous work includes creating methods improvements for Louisiana's 2023 Coastal Master Plan as well as probabilistic model development for the Louisiana Watershed Initiative, addressing coastal surge and wave-driven risk modeling and joint surge/riverine flood hazard modeling respectively. He also has experience working with decision-making under deep uncertainty, a family of methodological frameworks for tackling hard problems of public policy when there is uncertainty of what the future holds and analysts can’t confidently put probability distributions to the problem.

Geldner believes it is crucial that applied research tackling complex environmental challenges addresses not only the questions being asked by decision makers, but also questions of equity to help ensure that the work protects the people who need it most.