Meet IonE Postdoctoral Fellowship Program Alum Shubhechchha Sharma
In 2024, we published a feature story on the Institute on the Environment’s Postdoctoral Fellowship program, highlighting our vision to reimagine the postdoctoral experience for early-career scientists and researchers. Since then, we’ve shared stories of the original postdocs who inspired this initiative. Today we’re featuring Shubhechchha Sharma, PhD, a recent alum of the program, pictured above.
Read the first article in the series.
By focusing on system-level solutions for climate resilience, communities can move beyond short-term fixes to create equitable solutions with lasting impact. This strategy, centered on designing durable frameworks, defines Shubhechchha Sharma’s scientific research approach.
Throughout her IonE postdoctoral fellowship, Sharma, who goes by “Suby” informally, applied her background in climate resilience and environmental modeling to engage in several climate change-related projects that aim to generate actionable solutions and emphasize the application of research for meaningful impact.
After starting her fellowship in 2022, Sharma worked under the guidance of IonE Director of Research & Knowledge Initiatives Melissa Kenney. “Suby is one of the most outcome-driven people I’ve ever worked with,” says Kenney. Through her work, she is actively working to advance resilience at local to global scales.
Part of Sharma’s role at IonE involved collaborating with federal partners – such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Within NOAA, she worked with the National Weather Service and the Office of Water Protection to develop a framework through which weather information reaches hard-to-reach communities.
Sharma notes the team wasn’t working toward one-off individual success stories, they wanted to develop transformative systems to support community resiliency. “So, how do you make a good system?” she prompts.
When severe weather causes hazardous conditions – like tornadoes or floods – time-sensitive alerts can mean the difference between being caught off guard and taking critical, protective measures.
“Generally, with weather updates, we tend to get information through phones or the internet. But there are communities who do not have access to those resources,” says Sharma.
Stemming from this issue, Sharma developed an information supply chain framework detailing pathways where community members might be more likely to get their weather information. Through her research, she provided recommendations that could help NOAA track who it has engaged, who they missed, and how they might reach new populations.
Alongside this framework, she created a theory of change model depicting how the identified leverage points could affect change.
When it comes to hard-to-reach communities, this has never been done before,” Sharma explains. “And I feel like that’s my biggest achievement from my work at IonE.
In addition to this project, she has also worked with a number of federal data products such as the NOAA Office of Water Predictions’ flood inundation mapping in order to create tools that are usable and understandable for the general public.
In September 2025, she was named as a recipient of the American Meteorological Society Editor’s Award for “providing extensive and constructive reviews on a manuscript that were very helpful to the editor and the authors.”
Sharma shared that being part of the IonE Postdoctoral Fellowship program has opened up possibilities for her outside of traditional academia. And – similar to many of her peers – she enjoyed the cohort experience of the program.
“I feel like the greatest thing about the cohorts is the collaborative learning,” she says. “It’s a community where you can get real time feedback and motivation.”
