Disclaimer: this website is composed of symbols and images that do not in themselves carry meaning outside of a total social situation which none of us choose.
Hi, I'm Drew. My organic, GMO-free, low-sodium website is lovingly built from whatever I decide to post online. For that reason, it has a lot of stuff on it. Navigate as follows:
- If you are interested in SCIENCE: I just defended my PhD at Harvard in Environmental Engineering, and I will be starting as a postdoc at the Duke Nicholas School of the Environment in July 2025. 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. I'm also interested in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) dynamics and trends, with the goal of improving air quality. If you want to learn more, check out out my ongoing projects, research papers, conference presentations, and environmental datasets. Everything is open access.
- If you are interested in THINKING THAT ISN'T SCIENCE: Outside science, my work imagines how humanity can democratically govern itself in an age of environmental crisis. Together with social scientists, historians, and designers, I imagine the sorts of institutions and protocols that would allow humanity to democratically manage our economy and its interchange with ecosystems. This has taken the form of books, video games, public writing, and academic publications in history, architecture, and environmental studies. I am happy to do course visits, give talks, etc. on this material; you can reach me at drew [at] drewpendergrass [dot] com (or the academic address in my CV).
- 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 experimental 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. If you want to follow my work, you can subscribe to my newsletter below (expect emails every six months or so at most):
Upcoming events
Lecture: New Institute (Hamburg)
Date: 18 June, 2025 at time TBD
Location: New Institute, Hamburg, Germany
I will be giving a lecture entitled "‘A curious natural selection’: János Kornai’s evolutionary theory of socialist institutions" at the New Institute in Hamburg. Details TBD.
Book talk: Bokkafé Pilgatan (Umeå)
Date: 13 June, 2025 at 6:30pm CEST
Location: Bokkafé Pilgatan, Umeå, Sweden
I will be giving a book talk on the Swedish translation of Half-Earth Socialism in Umeå, joined in conversation by Johan Örestig Kling. More info here.
Book talk: Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus (Stockholm)
Date: 11 June, 2025 at 6pm CEST
Location: Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus, Stockholm, Sweden
I will be giving a book talk on the Swedish translation of Half-Earth Socialism in Stockholm, joined in conversation by Ståle Holgersen. More info here.
Additional events, future and past, are available on my events page.
The latest science!
Pendergrass, D.C., D. J. Jacob, Y. J. Oak, R. Dang, L. H. Yang, E. Beaudry, N. K. Colombi, S. Zhai, H. Kim, J.-s. Choi, J.-s. Park, S. Kim, and H. Liao. Wintertime trends of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in South Korea, 2012-2022: response of nitrate and organic components to decreasing NOx emissions. In revision at Geophysical Research Letters. Link to submitted PDF. Link to preprint (open access).
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 Brief Q&A
Q. How can I contact you or keep up with your work?
A. You can reach me at drew [at] drewpendergrass [dot] com (or the academic address in my CV); I'm pretty quick with email. However, if your email is unpleasant, you should direct it to grievances@drewpendergrass.com, an inbox I definitely read.
If you want to keep up with new projects, the best way is to subscribe to my newsletter. I send short emails a few times a year with major updates on science and writing. I keep my social media limited these days, but you can follow/DM me on Bluesky. My old Twitter is still up, but I don't use it anymore.
Q. Who are you?
A. Well, to start off, to my knowledge, there is no portrait of me that ages in my place, I have nothing to do with explosions, I hold no world records, I have absolutely no intention of running for Senate in the great state of Minnesota, and I am reluctant to resort to black magic. Besides that, I am a doctoral student in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University, and I freelance on the side for publications including Harper's and The Guardian. I'm also at work on a sci-fi novel and have a book under contract with Verso on economic democracy. In my activism and organizing, we work to make ecological democracy a reality in my home of Massachusetts. I am also a long-time steward in the Harvard Graduate Students Union (UAW local 5117). For more information, you can check out my projects page or my CV.
Q. Why does this page keep changing?
A. This page is randomly generated by the server on each load. Most of the page's contents are not displayed on one particular load, so for the full experience reload a bunch of times.
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