Jennifer Francis
American scientist
Jennifer Ann Francis is an American atmospheric scientist. She became a senior scientist at Woods Hole Research Center in 2018, after being a research professor at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences starting in 1994.
Education
Francis received a B.S. in meteorology from San Jose State University in 1988 and a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington in 1994.
Career
From 1987 to 1988, she was a research assistant at the Ames Research Center. From 1988 to 1994, while attending the University of Washington, she was a research assistant at the department of Polar Science Center there. From 1994 through 2018 she was a research professor at Rutgers University's School of Environmental and Biological Sciences's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences in North Brunswick, New Jersey. On October 18, 2018, she joined the staff of Woods Hole Research Center, in Falmouth, Massachusetts as a senior scientist.
Research
Francis's research focuses on climate change in the Arctic, and has published over 40 scientific papers on the topic. It is also her opinion that warming in the Arctic may be changing the jet stream, which, in turn, may be leading to abnormal weather patterns such as an unusually long winter in the United Kingdom, the 2013 Colorado floods, and the unusually cold conditions across much of the southern United States in early 2014. Specifically, Francis argues that the heating and cooling of Arctic seawater (the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the world) has slowed down the jet stream, resulting in weather conditions persisting for longer than they usually would.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16729075. VIAF identifies the subject as 537149068519565730007. The Library of Congress control number is no2002091061. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018, 1994, 1988 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jennifer Francis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.