Office: Holden Hall 113

For all inquiries, please contact Dr. Hayhoe's assistant, Laura James. Please note that Dr. Hayhoe is not currently accepting graduate students.

For more information visit: Web Site

Katharine Hayhoe is a Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law in the Public Administration program of the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. She is also the Chief Scientist for the global conservation organization, The Nature Conservancy.

Dr. Hayhoe has a B.Sc. in physics and astronomy from the University of Toronto and an M.S. and Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Colgate University, Trinity College, and Wycliffe College and Victoria University at the University of Toronto.

Professor Hayhoe's research focuses on developing and applying high-resolution climate projections to evaluate the future impacts of climate change on human society and the natural environment. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed abstracts and publications and co-authored Downscaling Techniques for High-Resolution Climate Projections: From Global Change to Local Impacts (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and served as lead author on key reports for the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the National Academy of Sciences, including the Second, Third and Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessments. Her TED talk, The Most Important Thing You Can Do About Climate Change: Talk About It has received over 4 million views and she is the author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (One Signal/Simon & Schuster).

She is an Oxfam Sister of the Planet and currently serves on a number of advisory boards including the science advisory board for the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University, the international advisory board for the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, the sustainability advisory board for Netflix, and the advisory board for the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.

In 2019, Dr. Hayhoe was named a United Nations Champion of the Earth in Science and Innovation. In 2022, she received the American Geophysical Union's Ambassador Award and was named a Fellow of the AGU, while in 2023 she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, she was awarded the Mani L. Bhaumik Award for Public Engagement with Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Climate Leadership Award from ecoAmerica, and the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson College, while in 2025 she received the Posey Leadership Award from Austin College.