Meet Ruza Ivanovic, PLOS Climate Section Editor for Palaeoclimate

In this blog post, we speak to Dr Ruza Ivanovic, PLOS Climate Section Editor for Palaeoclimate.

Could you tell us a bit about how you ended up in your area of study?

I got hooked during my undergraduate degree, sitting in Paul Valdes and Rachael Flecker’s classes on warm climates past and future. The jigsaw puzzle of piecing together all lines of evidence to understand at a fundamental level how and why climate changes, and the reverberations around the Earth System. For my PhD, I trained in climate modelling and analytical isotope geochemistry. By the time I graduated, I realised that I really think like a modeller, not a chemist, and love the ‘what if’ scenario testing one can try with complex simulations.  

What’s the focus of your current work, and what questions are you hoping to address?

As time went on, I became increasingly drawn to the coupled ocean-ice-atmosphere system, with abrupt earth system changes at the core of that fascination. My current work focuses in this area, primarily examining rapid climate change in the late Quaternary period (the last few hundred thousand years) in the context of broader and slower background climate trends. Can the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapse; did it in the past, if so why; might it in the near future; what controls its [rapid] resumption? What drives processes of deglaciation (climate warming and ice sheet waning), and why are past deglaciations different to one another? How do interactions with the ocean and atmosphere influence ice sheet stability, and similarly, what are the repercussions of ice sheet collapse on the climate system? Are tipping points, bi/multi-stability and oscillatory frameworks robust and useful ways to examining these physical processes? Related to all of this, but perhaps most existentially, how inevitable was the trajectory of our palaeoclimate history and how much of the recorded change was, for example, stochastic? Or, in other words, what is a reasonable target for climate prediction vs. process understanding?

Why do the principles of Open Access and Open Science matter to you?

I love to learn and I believe that it is in everyone’s interests to ensure that knowledge is openly accessible in order to achieve equitable, transparent and rigorous research – and its varied applications – with genuine accountability. Knowledge should be a shared public good, rather than a privilege, and if we work only on open platforms then we can all mutually benefit from the diversity of scrutiny, creativity and perspective that openness affords. I also believe that open research is the best way to accelerate scientific progress across disciplinary silos and research cultures/epistemologies because it facilitates the spread of ideas.

Why did you decide to join PLOS Climate as a Section Editor?

I decided to join PLOS Climate as a Section Editor because I strongly believe in the journal’s mission to advance open, interdisciplinary climate research that is accessible to both the scientific community and society at large. As a palaeoclimate researcher, I work with records of past climate change and use complex numerical models to better understand the processes controlling Earth’s climate system. I’m particularly drawn to the unique platform provided by PLOS Climate for integrating palaeoclimate insights with our need to better understand contemporary climate change and its impacts across scales and through time. I am excited to support rigorous, transparent peer review and to help foster dialogue between disciplines, ensuring that evidence we have from the past plays a meaningful role in addressing today’s urgent climate challenges.

What kind of papers would you be particularly excited to see submitted to your section of PLOS Climate?

I would be particularly excited to see papers that demonstrate clear, practical and rigorous pathways for using information from palaeoclimate to attain more robust knowledge of modern and future climate change. I welcome research that elucidates the fundamental connections between different earth system components, or that has direct application to contemporary climate challenges. I am really keen to see articles that explicitly map the work to profound ideas, and so encourage open and respectful debate; ask the big questions, tackle the greatest challenges and always assess how we can do our research differently.