Disclaimer: any errors on this website are in fact an attempt to transcend the reality circumscribed by the limits of language.

Hi, I'm Drew. Welcome to my fair trade, gluten-free, GMO-free website! I am a postdoctoral associate at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment and an incoming assistant professor of environmental studies and sciences at Oberlin College; also, I keep the old gods. Be aware that this website is very large, and some of it is randomly generated. For the full experience, reload a bunch of times and navigate as follows:

• If you are interested in my SCIENTIFIC WORK: In my scientific research, I use satellite data to track pollution back to its source and monitor emissions in real time, and I maintain free open-source software that allows others to do the same. If you want to learn more, check out out my ongoing projects, research papers, conference presentations, and environmental datasets. Everything is open access, and you can find a general-audience explanation of each of the publications I led in my newsletter.
• If you are interested in my INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK: My interdisciplinary work imagines how humanity can democratically govern itself in an age of environmental crisis. With collaborators, I imagine the sorts of institutions and protocols that advance economic democracy within planetary boundaries, with an emphasis on connecting science with social movements. This work has taken the form of books, video games, public writing, and academic publications.
• If you are interested in MY CV: you can download it here.
• If you are interested in MISCELLANEOUS: This website is big because I have had it since high school and I don't delete things. If you search for it, you can find ephemera I have made over the years, including original music.
• If you are interested in HUMAN CONTACT: I can be reached at drew [at] drewpendergrass [dot] com or at the academic address in my CV. For upcoming events, check out my events page. You can follow me on Bluesky or LinkedIn. The best way to follow my work is to subscribe to my newsletter below (expect emails every six months or so at most):

Upcoming events

Additional events, future and past, are available on my events page.

Featured science!

Pendergrass, D. C., Jacob, D. J., Oak, Y. J., Dang, R., Yang, L. H., Beaudry, E., Colombi, N. K., Zhai, S., Kim, H., Choi, J., Park, J., Kim, S., Li, K., & Liao, H. (2025). Wintertime Trends of Fine Particulate Matter (PM_2.5) in South Korea, 2012–2022: Response of Nitrate and Organic Components to Decreasing NO_x Emissions. Geophysical Research Letters, 52(19), e2025GL116091. Link to paper (open access). Link to PDF. Read a general audience explainer.

Figure: DJF PM_2.5 and trends in South Korea. Panels (a) and (b) show DJF mean PM_2.5 at AirKorea surface stations in (a) 2012 and (b) 2022. PM_2.5 monitoring at these stations started in 2015, and data for 2012 is from a synthetic PM_2.5 network produced using a random forest (RF) algorithm applied to the station data including PM₁₀ (Pendergrass et al., 2025). Panel (c) shows the DJF emission-driven trend in PM_2.5 after removing meteorological influence with a multi-linear regression (MLR) fit. Panel (d) shows observed DJF PM_2.5 averaged over 25 sites in the city of Seoul, disaggregated into daytime (8-18 LT) and nighttime (22-5 LT) for weekdays and weekends. Panel (e) shows the emission-driven PM_2.5 timeseries (residual from the meteorological MLR model) for the Seoul 0.25°×0.3125° grid cell (centered at 37.5°N,127.0°E) and averaging data from 37 sites.

You can learn more about my research on the projects page, or you can read through all of our scientific papers and presentations on their respective pages.

A featured interdisciplinary project!

A random interview

Play Alchemy!

"So fun you won't even need friends!"

Warning: this website is proudly WOKE.