French translation: Catalysts of Change: Women Leaders in Science - Cynthia Rosenzweig

CIMMYT has launched a ‘TED Talk meets fireside chat’-style series on women leaders. As Marion Wright Edelman said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” If we want more women leaders in science institutions like ours, we need to provide more opportunities to hear from women leaders about their life journeys, lessons, and insights. We seek to highlight women who are leaders in all sorts of capacities, fields and disciplines, because we believe that leadership styles can take many different forms.
This is our latest episode from the series Catalysts of Change, from Tuesday January 16, 2024.
Presenting Cynthia Rosenzweig.
Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the co-located Columbia University Climate School’s Center for Climate Systems Research. At NASA GISS, she heads the Climate Impacts Group whose mission is to investigate the interactions of climate (both variability and change) on systems and sectors important to human well-being, including agriculture, cities, and conservation.
Rosenzweig is the co-founder and member of the Executive Committee of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), a globally integrated transdisciplinary study on climate change and the food system at regional, national, and global scales. This project involves the participation of over 1,000 distinguished researchers from both developed and developing countries. Rosenzweig has developed new methods for detecting and attributing observed changes in physical and biological systems to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. She has been a pioneer in research on the impacts and adaptation to climate change and climate variability.
In 2019, Rosenzweig served as the lead coordinating author for the Food Security chapter on Climate Change and Land of the Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She is the co-director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) and co-editor of the UCCRN's First and Second Assessment Reports on Climate Change and Cities (ARC3). Rosenzweig was the co-chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), an expert panel convened by the mayor to advise the city on the adaptation of its critical infrastructure. She co-led the Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
In 2022, Rosenzweig was awarded the World Food Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture."
Following her presentation, Rosenzweig was interviewed by Vimbayi Grace Petrova Chimonyo, a crop modeling scientist from the Sustainable Agri-Food Systems Program at CIMMYT. With 10 years of experience as an agricultural scientist, Chimonyo's research focuses on integrated crop management to address issues of food and nutritional security, climate change, and rural development. She primarily works with crop simulation models as a tool for adapting to climate change and variability, and improving food security, especially for small-scale farmers.
Chimonyo has a strong understanding of resource use (water, soil nutrients, and solar radiation) within the agricultural sector, the water-food-nutrition-health nexus, the water-energy-food nexus within food system ecosystems, and the need for transformative strategies for inclusive food security. Her main research interests lie in the development of resilient cropping systems with an emphasis on sustainable intensification under climate variability and change.