Peter Van Katwyk

Ph.D. Candidate @ Brown
ML Engineer
NSF GRFP Fellow

I’m Peter, a Ph.D. Candidate at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island. I am in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS) and the Data Science Institude at Brown (DSI) with an affiliation with the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society (IBES). I work with Dr. Karianne J. Bergen in the SciML Research Group.

My work sits at the intersection of scientific machine learning, climate science, and data science. I build AI systems that enable faster, more interpretable, and more reliable modeling of Earth processes—tools that help researchers and decision-makers confront climate risks with greater confidence and clarity. From deep learning frameworks for sea level rise projections to reinforcement learning for autonomous air traffic control, my projects span academia, government, and industry.

Recent Events

  • March 2025: First-author preprint, ISEFlow v1.0: A Flow-Based Neural Network Emulator for Improved Sea Level Projections and Uncertainty Quantification, has been uploaded to EES Open Archive.
  • Dec 2024: Presented at AGU 2024: ISEFlow: A Flow-Based Neural Network Emulator for Ice Sheet Evolution and Sea Level Rise.
  • May-August 2024: Interned at NASA AMES (Mountain View, CA) in the Systems Optimization branch working on autonomous air traffic control using reinforcement learning.
  • April 2024: Presentation on Improving Sea Level Projections with AI at the Brown Graduate School’s Research Matters showcase.
  • December 2023: First-author paper, A Variational LSTM Emulator of Sea Level Contribution from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, has been published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES).
  • December 2023: Presentation at AGU 2024: Variational LSTM emulator of sea level contribution from the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
  • October 2023: Successfully completed qualifying exam.
  • August 2023: Co-authored review paper, Scientific Discovery in the age of artificial intelligence, published in Nature.
  • July 2023: Preprint, A variational LSTM emulator of seal level contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet, is now available on EES Open Archive.
  • May 2023: Presented my work on neural network-based Antarctic ice sheet model emulators at the 54th International Liège Colloquium on Ocean Dynamics.
  • April 2022: Awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in Geosciences – Artificial Intelligence.