Hi, I'm Drew. Welcome to my gluten-free, fair trade, artisanally-crafted website! I am an incoming assistant professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College; also, I am not a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold. Navigate this site as follows:
- If you are interested in my SCIENTIFIC WORK: I use satellite data to track pollution back to its source, monitor emissions, and diagnose the drivers of pollution change. For the details, check out out my ongoing projects, research papers, conference presentations, open-source software, and datasets. For general-audience explanations of some key findings, you can read my newsletter.
- If you are interested in my INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK: I work broadly on imagining institutions and protocols that advance economic democracy within planetary boundaries, with an emphasis on connecting science with (1) social movements and (2) economic planning. This work has taken the form of books, public writing, academic publications, and video games.
- 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. On it, you can find ephemera I have made over the years, including essays and reporting and original music. For the full experience of this randomly-generated website, reload a bunch of times.
- If you are interested in CONTACT: I can be reached at drew [at] drewpendergrass [dot] com, at the academic address in my CV, and on my only active socials: Bluesky and LinkedIn. Upcoming events are on my events page, and you can keep up with my work by subscribing to my (infrequent) newsletter below:
Upcoming events
Talk: CHEEREIO at the 12th International GEOS-Chem Meeting (St. Louis, MO)
Date: 8 June 2026 at 4:00pm CT
Location: Washington University in St. Louis
I will be at the GEOS-Chem meeting, giving a workshop on the technical aspects of using CHEEREIO.
Talk: Ammonia at the 12th International GEOS-Chem Meeting (St. Louis, MO)
Date: 9 June 2026 at 2:10pm CT
Location: Washington University in St. Louis
I will be at the GEOS-Chem meeting, giving a talk on my ongoing work quantifying global ammonia emissions from 2013 through 2024, along with their drivers and seasonality.
Presentation: 13th Biennial US Society for Ecological Economics Conference (Oberlin, OH)
Date: 19 June 2026 at TBD
Location: Oberlin College
I will be presenting a paper entitled "Beyond prices: multi-criteria signals for a social-ecological transformation" at the USSEE conference on behalf of myself and my co-authors Joël Foramitti, Walther Zeug, and Jakob Heyer.
Additional events, future and past, are available on my events page.
You can learn more about my research on the projects page, or you can read through all of my scientific papers and presentations on their respective pages.
A featured interdisciplinary project!
A feature article for Harper's on soil carbon
This story covers a long-term ecological research (LTER) site at Harvard Forest, where some scientists, inspired by the Denver Broncos' snow-melting technology, simulated the effects of climate change on a patch of forest by burying heating coils below the soil.
Pendergrass, D. C. (2020). "Ground Control: How forests adapt to climate change." Harper's Magazine. | Read it here.
Read more of my writing here.
A random media appearance
Blueprint from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (radio)
19 February 2021 | Listen here
In this radio interview, my co-author Troy Vettese and I spoke with Blueprint's Jonathan Green about how land use change might help us make sense of recent global fire crises from California to Siberia, Brazil to Australia.
Additional interviews and media are available on my interviews page.
All the cool kids are using CHEEREIO!
CHEEREIO is a tool that uses observations of pollutants in the atmosphere, measured from satellites or surface stations, to correct supercomputer models that simulate the Earth. Powerful use cases for CHEEREIO include tracking pollution back to its source, even if there are no local observations on the ground, and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions in near-real-time. Read more on my projects page or the offical CHEEREIO site.
