Vaishali Naik, along with her fellow coordinating lead author (CLA) Sophie Szopa, provided the necessary leadership to deliver the 2021 IPCC chapter on short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs), which established the basis for comanagement of climate change and air quality.

Vaishali Naik has an extensive research career with major publications in modeling and analysis of atmospheric composition and chemistry. She has led, along with her Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) cohorts, innovative model studies addressing how short-lived pollutant emissions drive climate change, including how the COVID-19-related reduction in pollutants changed climate forcing over East Asia. She has participated in and led multiauthor assessments of tropospheric chemistry. For these reasons, she was selected as a lead author for the 2021 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report’s (AR6) chemistry chapter. The chemistry-climate chapter in IPCC reports is always a difficult one because it sits on the periphery of the core assessment of physical climate. The coupling of climate change and air quality—a natural one—has often been discouraged by the governments in the scoping of the chapters, or by other climate scientists. This has been the case since the IPCC Second Assessment Report (1995). In AR6, her chapter 6 on SLCFs was becoming difficult to draft when suddenly, late in the cycle of drafts, the two CLAs stepped down, leaving a vacuum. The IPCC leadership then promoted (tasked is a better word) Vaishali Naik and Sophie Szopa to be the CLAs with responsibility of delivering the chapter and getting it through the governments’ review. This leadership role occurred after the third lead author meeting, and then COVID hit, relegating the fourth lead author meeting to Zoom. So the AR6 was delivered without any further in-person meetings, which are usually essential to fine-tuning the chapters and reaching consensus among the authors.

Vaishali Naik showed breadth and acumen in sorting through the published literature, in directing and incentivizing the lead author team, and in assembling a chapter that was able in the end to deliver a clear scientific assessment of short-lived climate forcers, to wit: Future air pollution changes are more likely driven by changes in emissions than in climate; and control of SLCFs may be critical for near-term climate goals. From my direct experience, Vaishali is an excellent colleague and leader.

—Michael J. Prather, University of California, Irvine

It is truly an honor to receive the 2023 Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award and share it with my co-CLA Sophie Szopa. I am privileged to be receiving an award honoring Piers Sellers’s inspiring multidisciplinary work and visionary leadership on global environmental issues. I am very grateful to Michael for nominating me and the Global Environmental Change awards committee for this honor. My contribution to the delivery of “best available science” in the 2021 IPCC chapter on short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs) is built on scientific knowledge, research skills, and confidence that I have acquired because of the incredible support of my wonderful mentors and mentees, colleagues, and collaborators throughout my career. I am extremely grateful to my Ph.D. adviser, Don Wuebbles, for introducing me to the essential role of atmospheric chemistry in the climate system and global modeling, instilling in me big-picture thinking, and for allowing me to carve my own research path. I am grateful to Denise Mauzerall and Michael Oppenheimer, my postdoc mentors, for furthering my understanding of the policy relevance of chemistry-climate interactions. I am fortunate to be working alongside my talented and creative Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) colleagues, and I thank them for their collaboration, generosity, and support. My deepest thanks to Larry Horowitz, my chemistry-climate modeling “guru,” whose guidance and support have been invaluable for my professional growth. I very much appreciate John Dunne, my division leader, and V. Ramaswamy, our laboratory director, for their encouragement, mentorship, and leadership. I would also like to thank the postdocs and students who have worked with me for helping strengthen my knowledge and enhance my leadership skills. I am very grateful to Arlene Fiore, Jean-François Lamarque, and Ron Stouffer for catalyzing my coordination of multimodel intercomparison projects that inform IPCC reports and opening doors to long-term collaborations that I have benefited from immensely. My sincere thanks to the full chapter 6 author team including review editors for their important contributions and the Working Group I report authors, leadership, and the technical support unit for their support in delivering the scientific assessment of SLCFs in AR6. Special thanks to Sophie for her astute leadership and camaraderie making it so much easier to survive the constant state of panic in 2021! Finally, thank you to my husband, Rohit, and our daughter, Keya, for their endless love, support, and patience. —Vaishali Naik, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, N.J.