Dr. Moji Sadegh has been selected for the AGU 2023 Natural Hazards Early Career Award “for his groundbreaking contributions to characterizing the causes and consequences of emerging climate-related risks.” Moji has led innovative and transdisciplinary research, emerging as one of the most prolific members of the natural hazards community. He is internationally recognized and admired for his research, education, and professional service. Moji’s group has conducted pioneering research on how the interactions and feedbacks between droughts, heat waves, and wildfires shape emerging risks to socioecological systems. His group employed innovative methods to uncover elevational trends in forest fires, showing that the high-elevation flammability barrier has faded in the past 4 decades in response to warming in many mountainous regions. This process explains some of the recent uncharacteristic high-elevation wildfires, such as the 2021 Dixie Fire in California. Moji also made significant strides in characterizing the socioenvironmental impacts of climatic extremes with prominent policy implications. He showed that human and infrastructure exposure to wildfires has significantly increased. Using an innovative method to disentangle the role of various drivers in the observed trends, Moji demonstrated that the wildland-urban interface expansion—widely claimed as the reason for increasing exposure to wildfires—accounted for less than a quarter of the human exposure trend, while the expansion of wildfires to existing human settlements accounted for the majority of the trend. Furthermore, Moji has made significant contributions to the drought and heat wave literature, and their compounding impacts. His group utilized over a century of observations and demonstrated that the drought–heat wave self-propagation mechanism geographically expanded these compound extremes and increased the likelihood of a continental-scale dry-hot event. Another notable example is his publications on the increasing inequality of heat wave exposure in a warming climate. He showed that if adaptation capacity is taken into consideration, the lowest-income quarter of the world’s population will likely experience as much heat wave exposure as the other three quarters combined by the end of the century. Moji has developed and released several software packages including multivariate frameworks for analyzing compound events and generating multihazard risk scenarios. His models are publicly available and widely used across various fields including geosciences, engineering, and finance. In summary, Moji is a bright and young scientist who has achieved international standing through significant fundamental contributions, and he is most deserving of the AGU Natural Hazards Early Career Award. Congratulations, Moji! —Amir AghaKouchak, University of California, Irvine

It is with great humility that I accept the 2023 AGU Natural Hazards Early Career Award. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my nominators, Profs. Amir AghaKouchak, John Abatzoglou, Ashok Mishra, and Gabriele Villarini, and my mentor, Prof. Soroosh Sorooshian. I also thank the award committee for bestowing this honor, which has invigorated and strengthened my commitment to advancing the state of the art in natural hazards research. In my relatively short career, I have been privileged to work with a diverse group of outstanding students who have stimulated and fed my intellectual curiosity and offered me the joy of observing them succeed and thrive. I have also had the incredible fortune to collaborate with exceptionally gifted, passionate, committed, and tenacious researchers at various career levels. To all my students and collaborators, I express my sincere appreciation. An era of climatic extremes brings upon the human society unprecedented challenges. The frequency, severity, magnitude, and spatial extent of various climate and weather extremes have increased substantially in the past decades. The human exposure to these extremes, and associated monetary and other societal losses, has also increased. But the scientific community has unparalleled opportunities to advance and inform societal and environmental resilience to such disturbances. For example, adaptation efforts have already decreased the human mortality rates associated with some weather extremes, such as heat waves, contrary to the exposure trends. Technological advances and equitable societal adaptation promise a brighter future for all of us. But we must act now; we have already lost precious time to curb our emissions and the associated climatic changes. In my field, big data, artificial intelligence, and enhanced computational power have already enabled answering questions that had remained unanswered for decades. Furthermore, enhanced transdisciplinary efforts have been opening novel and exciting research avenues with prime opportunities for young scientists. I am excited to see the new discoveries in the field of natural hazards. Let the journey of learning continue! Thank you, AGU, and I am looking forward to further engage with the community. —Moji Sadegh, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho