As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

- Matt Cartmill

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia in beautiful, damp Vancouver. I came to UBC after a few years in the Science, Technology and Environment Program in the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. I grew up in the diverse city of Toronto where even in the dead of winter, often packed in a baby carriage and left outside to sleep. Since then, I have been interested in the climate and societal responses to climate variability and change.

I spent my undergraduate days in the interdisciplinary Arts and Science Programme at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario learning just enough philosophy to make the rest of life difficult. I completed a master's degree in Environment Management specializing in air and water resources in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University where like most transplants to North Carolina I conducted research on lake ice. After traveling and some freelance writing and television work, I moved to the land-locked island of Madison, Wisconsin to do a PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin with the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

In my spare time, I enjoy visiting "the cottage" with family and friends, an array of water sports, running around the forest, watching and pretending to write films, listening to Caribbean music and doing Origami, though generally not all at once.