We can build a better world,

we just have to imagine it first.

SOLARPUNK IS THE FUTURE

Dr. Tosca is a climate scientist, a humanist, an activist, and an artist

Her current research and public outreach explores the relationship between rangeland management and climate change. She is currently improving a model that aims to accurately quantify the carbon budget and ecosystem productivity for ranches and rangelands across the United States with the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Prior to Woodwell, her work explored the the synthesis of art and climate science and she continues to posit that engaging with artists, designers, and makers is instrumental to solving the climate crisis. She spoke about this work as the featured plenary speaker at the AGU Fall Meeting 2022. Mika is an out and proud transgender scientist (she/her pronouns) and a vocal advocate for the queer and trans communities in Chicago and beyond.

In 2019 she was interviewed on a segment of Chicago Tonight–on PBS WTTW–about her work combining art and science, and in early 2023 she was featured on a segment of the BBC’s Science in Action. In the summer of 2023 she installed her first public art piece and founded The Solarpunk Project, a not-for-profit initiative aimed at making climate science accessible to non-scientists.

Dr. Tosca has written about the importance of combining the imagination of art, design principles, environmental aesthetics, and climate science, and is often invited to speak about this at many institutions and universities including the University of California, Santa Barbara, MIT, the University of Texas, Columbia University, the Field Museum, Lewis University, the AGU Fall Meeting, Miami University (Ohio), and the University of Michigan. She participated in a panel with Dr. Katharine Hayhoe as part of the Chicago-based Third Coast Disrupted art exhibition.

In 2022 she organized the first ever on-site art exhibition at the AGU Fall Meeting. She also spoke about the importance of combining art and science to non-scientists at the 2022 Honcho Campout queer electronic music festival. She is an active participant in the EcoVoice Project, a collective that uses music and interdisciplinary collaboration to inform, connect, and inspire people to act for environmentally just causes.

In 2021 she was named to the Grist 50 Fixers list and in 2023 she was interviewed by HEATED’s Arielle Samuelson about her work and activism.

Dr. Tosca earned her Ph.D. in Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine, in the Earth System Science Department, where she was advised by Dr. Jim Randerson and Dr. Charlie Zender. Her doctoral thesis was titled: "Fire and Smoke in the Earth System: Evaluating the impact of fire aerosols on regional and global climate"

Prior to SAIC, Mika was featured on ABC7 news in Los Angeles talking about our recent study on the correlation between air pollution and global warming! She has been published in many academic journals including Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Geophysical Research Letters, and Remote Sensing.

Prior to her transition and coming to SAIC, Dr. Tosca was interviewed by "Science in Action" on the BBC World Service: interview begins at 21:30. She has also penned a non-academic popular science article about her work on landscape fire in Africa for a neat website called The Conversation.

Check it out, you can Google MyCitations.