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 organic, GMO-free, gluten-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, my mind's eye exists only in a figurative sense. 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
Panel: »Nichtstun fürs Klima!«: Brecht's Daoism as a strategy of interventionist non-action (Berlin, Ger.)
Date: 12 February 2026 at 8:00pm CET
Location: Literature Forum at the Brecht House, Chausseestraße 125, 10115 Berlin, Germany
As part of the Brecht-Tage festival in Berlin, my co-author Troy Vettese and I will be presenting some of our work on the surprising resonances between Bertolt Brecht and Laozi: both figures praise forms of non-action and uselessness. In conversation with Heinrich Detering, we will comment on the implications for climate action. This is the fourth of four events taking place at the Brecht-Haus this evening, running from 4:30pm through 9:30pm CET. More information on the Brecht-Tage 2026 website.
Lecture: NC State Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Seminar Series (Raleigh, NC)
Date: 20 February 2026 at 3:30pm ET
Location: NC State campus (exact location tbd)
I will be presenting some of my current work on emissions quantification as part of the NC State Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Seminar Series.
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 (PM2.5) in South Korea, 2012–2022: Response of Nitrate and Organic Components to Decreasing NOx Emissions. Geophysical Research Letters, 52(19), e2025GL116091. Link to paper (open access). Link to PDF. Read a general audience explainer.
Figure: DJF PM2.5 and trends in South Korea. Panels (a) and (b) show DJF mean PM2.5 at AirKorea surface stations in (a) 2012 and (b) 2022. PM2.5 monitoring at these stations started in 2015, and data for 2012 is from a synthetic PM2.5 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 PM2.5 after removing meteorological influence with a multi-linear regression (MLR) fit. Panel (d) shows observed DJF PM2.5 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 PM2.5 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 short primer on the politics of geoengineering
In 2025, I wrote a short essay on the politics of geoengineering for an edited volume called Power Shift from WVU Press. I am in good company (Joshua Clover, Leah Aronowsky, Dominic Boyer, Mijin Cha, Cameron Hu, and Ashley Dawson are among the contributors). You can buy the whole book here.
Pendergrass, D. C. (2025). Geoengineering. In I. Szeman and J. Wenzel (Eds.), Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy. West Virginia University Press. | Read it here.
Read more of my writing here.
A random interview
Current Affairs Podcast with Nathan J. Robinson (podcast)
7 July 2022 | Listen here
My co-author Troy Vettese and I spoke with Nathan from the Current Affairs podcast about our book Half-Earth Socialism.
Additional interviews are available on my interviews page.
Play Alchemy!
"So fun you won't even need friends!"
