PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Nicholas Lutsko

Also known as Nick Lutsko, Nicholas J. Lutsko

Nicholas Lutsko is a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography whose research on atmospheric dynamics and climate sensitivity reaches into machine learning. He completed a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Princeton University after an MSci in geophysics at Imperial College London, and worked as a postdoctoral associate in Tim Cronin's group at MIT from 2017 to 2019. As an assistant professor at Scripps, he was principal investigator of a NOAA-funded project on low cloud hot-spots in 2020. In 2023, he was one of the authors of ClimSim, a dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation that received an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper award at NeurIPS 2023, and in 2024 he was an author of Climate-Invariant Machine Learning, accepted by Science Advances. He is an associate professor at Scripps and leads its Climate Physics group.

Timeline

  1. 2017–2019

    Postdoctoral associate at MIT

    After an MSci in geophysics at Imperial College London and a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Princeton University, he works from 2017 to 2019 as a postdoctoral associate in Tim Cronin's group at MIT. His projects cover changes in precipitation efficiency in a warmer world and the role of mountains in temperature variability.

  2. 2020

    NOAA project on low clouds

    In 2020, as an assistant professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he is principal investigator of a NOAA-funded MAPP project that studies low cloud hot-spots and Earth's climate sensitivity. He co-leads it with Joel Norris, and NOAA's Climate Program Office supports it with around $410,000.

  3. 2023

    A solar geoengineering article

    In 2023, he is a coauthor of "Hydrological Consequences of Solar Geoengineering" in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. His group takes up solar geoengineering alongside its core work on large-scale climate dynamics and climate sensitivity.

  4. 2023

    The ClimSim dataset

    ClimSim, a dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation, appears at NeurIPS 2023 with him among its authors. A consortium of climate scientists and machine-learning researchers builds it from multi-scale climate simulations, and it holds 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors.

  5. 2023

    A NeurIPS dataset award

    The NeurIPS 2023 paper awards, announced in December 2023, name ClimSim an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper in the dataset category. He is on its author list.

  6. 2024

    Climate-invariant machine learning

    In 2024, he is one of 13 authors of Climate-Invariant Machine Learning, a framework that builds knowledge of climate processes into machine-learning algorithms so they keep high offline accuracy across a wide range of climate conditions in three atmospheric models. Science Advances accepts the paper in January 2024.

  7. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at Scripps

    He is an associate professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, with research interests in atmospheric dynamics, climate sensitivity, and climate impacts and adaptation. He leads the Scripps Climate Physics group, which works from geophysical fluid dynamics and radiative transfer to climate sensitivity, climate change impacts and solar geoengineering. In June 2026, the group's news marks the PhD defense of Anthony Wilson.

Career

  1. Since 2020University of California, San DiegoAssistant Professor
  2. 2017–2019Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPostdoctoral associate

Education

  1. Imperial College LondonMSci
  2. Princeton UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Nicholas Lutsko. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes University of California, San Diego. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, San Diego. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Nicholas Lutsko | Scripps Oceanography nlutsko.scrippsprofiles.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Tim Cronin Research web.mit.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Scripps Receives NOAA Award to Study Clouds, One of the Largest Uncertainties in Climate Change scripps.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Research & Publications — Scripps Climate Physics sio-climatephysics.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Announcing the NeurIPS 2023 Paper Awards – NeurIPS Blog blog.neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. [2112.08440] Climate-Invariant Machine Learning arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Scripps Climate Physics sio-climatephysics.com. Checked 22 October 2026.