Martin H. Trauth

Professor, University of Potsdam
Martin H. Trauth is a professor of paleoclimate dynamics at the University of Potsdam. After completing a degree in geophysics and geology, he started his career as a palaeoceanographer, working on questions of statistical uncertainties of paleoclimate time series. Then he became a paleolimnologist, working in the Argentine Andes, involved in the consequences of climate change in areas with extreme relief, also here with a strongly quantitative reconstructive and modelling approach. Recent work has focused on the statistical classification of climate change in order to better understand the relationship between climate and human evolution.

Martin H. Trauth published more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals such as Science, Nature Geosciences, Nature Communications and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. He also authored six bestselling textbooks on collection, processing, analysis and presentation of geoscientific data with SpringerNature, including the popular MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences, which will be published in its 6th edition in 2024. Martin H. Trauth has published a large number of popular science works and has been involved in television documentaries on various topics in an active or advisory capacity.

Since ~30 years Martin H. Trauth has taught courses mostly in data analysis in earth sciences and science communication. He also directed five international summer schools funded by the Volkswagen Foundation with 25-70 participants and 15-20 lecturers in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Germany–and during the Covid19 pandemic–online. He has supervised numerous bachelor's, master's and doctoral theses by young scientists who now hold positions of responsibility in geosciences in the private sector and in science. He is also very involved in communicating scientific knowledge to the public, above all in the context of the Potsdam Children's University with lectures for up to 1450 children aged 8-10, Open Day and Science Day, lectures for schools and the Society for the Gifted Child.