Quentin Nicolas

Quentin Nicolas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences, ETH Zürich, working in Heini Wernli's group. He obtained his Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science from UC Berkeley and holds a Master's in Applied Mathematics from École Polytechnique, France.

• Research Focus: Climate dynamics, tropical atmospheric dynamics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and interdisciplinary applications in medical modeling.
• Key Collaborations: William Boos (UC Berkeley), Bruce Buffett (UC Berkeley), Geoffrey Vallis (WHOI/SOR Bon Ventre), Irene Vignon-Clementel (Inria Paris).

His work on tropical orographic precipitation couples moist convection with mountain flow dynamics to explain rainfall distribution. He also studies seasonal precipitation extremes via plume buoyancy frameworks and superrotation physics with Geoffrey Vallis. Earlier work involved medical modeling for liver surgery and transplantation.

Scientific Awards:

• Best Student Paper Award, Geophysical Journal International (2023)
• Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA), AGU Fall Meeting (2021)

His publications span climate dynamics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and clinical biomechanics, with recent studies on wind sensitivity in tropical rainfall and MAC wave excitation in Earth's core. Quentin maintains active code repositories on GitHub for climate modeling and precipitation analysis.