Currently a founding Partner and Chief Scientist at ocean climate tech VC fund, Propeller Ventures, Dr. Pullen was most recently the Climate Strategist (previously Director of Product) at Jupiter Intelligence, a start-up delivering climate impact and risk analytics using AI/ML and cloud computing, and is an adjunct research scientist at Columbia’s Climate School. She was previously Associate Professor in Civil, Environmental, and Ocean Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology where she organized field studies globally to improve our understanding and prediction of the Earth system. She is a Fellow of the Explorers Club and a past science fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Dr. Pullen’s expertise spans climate, weather and hydroscience with a particular focus on high-resolution coastal urban prediction for flooding, heatwaves and other perils. Dr. Pullen’s research has contributed to the understanding and development of resilience and sustainability in coastal environments, and the enhancement of Earth System Models on weather, subseasonal-to-seasonal, and climate timescales.
She was earlier Director of the DHS-funded National Center for Maritime Security where she created programs in environmental and nuclear security and led applied research projects and commercialization of ocean and atmosphere tech across government labs, universities, the Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection. As a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, she pioneered the coupling of models of the ocean and atmosphere for operational prediction globally.
Dr. Pullen was elected to the Council and Executive Committee (2019-2022) of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and was previously the elected physical oceanography Councilor for The Oceanography Society (2015-2018). Dr. Pullen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee that reviewed the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4): Impacts and the NAS committees on Earth System Prediction (2014-2016) and Sustaining Ocean Observations (2020). She was a chapter co-author of the 2015 New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC2) report. She currently serves on the Climate Security Roundtable, a JASON-like group for the Intelligence Community.
She has taught graduate-level Dynamic Meteorology, Fluid Dynamics, and Oceanography and originated new graduate courses in Nuclear Security and also Tropical Meteorology as a Fulbright Visiting professor at the University of the Philippines (2018). She has advised and graduated master’s and Ph.D. students who work in academia, weather services, data science and renewable energy.
Dr. Pullen has served on program committees of the AMS Coastal Environments (chair), Gordon Research Conference on Coastal Ocean Modeling, International Waterside Security Conference, and co-chaired the Ocean Sciences Meeting (2010) and Maritime Risk Symposium (2015). She led the first international workshop on Coastal Hydrology and Surface Processes linked to Air/Sea Modeling in Madeira.
Dr. Pullen holds a Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Oregon State University, a postdoc in meteorology, and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona. At Macalester College, she majored in physics and math. She was the first undergraduate intern at the Santa Fe Institute and later worked at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
