Prof. Dr. Colette Heald

Colette Heald is Full Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science.

She was born in 1977 in Montréal, Canada.

Colette Heald received her undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University in Canada in 2000, and her PhD in Earth and Planetary Science from Harvard University in 2005. She held the NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California Berkeley from 2006-2007. She was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University from 2008-2011. She held the position of Associate Professor (2012-2015) and Full Professor (2015-2023) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty at ETH in 2024.

In 2015 Colette Heald was awarded the American Geophysical Union’s James B. Macelwane Medal for early career contributions to the geosciences. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. At MIT her contributions to teaching, mentoring, and leadership have been recognized as a recipient of the Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award (2016), the Committed to Caring Faculty Award (2020), the Distinguished Service and Leadership Award (2022), and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence and Advising (2022).