Jasper Kok, Ph.D.

Jasper Kok is a professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received a bachelor’s degree in physics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, his native country. He then obtained a master’s degree in applied physics from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Michigan in 2009, for which he received a Distinguished Dissertation Award. He then received an Advanced Study Program postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an NSF postdoctoral fellowship before starting at UCLA. His research focuses on the emission of atmospheric aerosols, in particular desert dust aerosols, and their impacts on radiation, clouds and climate. Kok was awarded an NSF CAREER award in 2016 and received the 2019 American Meteorological Society’s Henry Houghton Early Career award for “novel approaches to studying the physics of dust emissions into the atmosphere and the interactions of dust aerosols with Earth’s climate and beyond.”