Benjamin Zaitchik is the 2025-2026 AGU President-Elect. In this role, he is also Chair of the AGU Council and a member of the AGU Executive Committee. He has made several contributions to AGU as a founding leader of the GeoHealth section, an AGU delegate to the UNFCCC COP28 and a science advisor for Eos.

Zaitchik is a professor and department chair of Earth and Planetary Sciences at John Hopkins University, where he studies fundamental climate processes and their application to societal challenges. He leads several interdisciplinary projects exploring the propagation of climate stresses through complex natural-human systems, including work co-designed with community members.

Before joining Johns Hopkins, Zaitchik served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow at the U.S. Department of State and a research associate at NASA. His other leadership roles include co-chairing the World Meteorological Organization’s COVID-19 Task Team, serving as a commissioner on the Baltimore City Sustainability Commission to advance racial equity in sustainability and chairing the United Nations Group on Earth Observations Health Community of Practice Heat Work Group.

Zaitchik holds a Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University, a master’s degree in Crop and Soil Sciences from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard University. He is a fellow of AAAS and a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). He has received numerous honors, including the AMS Walter Orr Roberts Lecture in 2024 and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Peer Award.