David McGee

Professor David McGee specializes in isotope geochemistry and geochronology to reconstruct Earth’s climate history and improve future climate projections. He seeks to understand how Earth’s climate evolves over time. His current and past work studying paleoclimate has explored the history of the Sahara Desert, the rise and fall of large lakes in the western U.S., shifts in the tropical rainbelt, and changes in high-latitude temperatures and permafrost during Earth’s past warm intervals.

Through a range of collaborative projects, the McGee Lab for Paleoclimate and Geochronology examines the ways that rainfall patterns, winds, permafrost, and other parts of the Earth system have responded to natural climate changes in the past, and they use these records of past changes to benchmark the models and theories used to project the future. To reconstruct the history of Earth’s climate, his group looks for geochemical evidence of past conditions preserved in stalagmites, lake deposits, and deep-sea sediments through careful field observations, precise dating using uranium and its daughter isotopes, geochemical data, and comparisons with climate model outputs and modern climate data.

David joined the MIT EAPS faculty in 2012 after graduate studies at Tulane and Columbia Universities and a postdoc at the University of Minnesota. Prior to grad school, he taught secondary school science for 6 years. In 2020, he was named Associate Department Head for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and served in that role until his 2025 appointment as EAPS department head. He has also served since 2015 as director of the Terrascope first-year learning community, which is a program that engages an average of 50 students each year in exploring environmental challenges through project-based classes.