Thomas Teisberg

I work on instruments and methods for understanding Earth’s ice sheets (Antarctica and Greenland). I’m an electrical engineer by background, and I now work with Dr. Dustin Schroeder, whose lab mixes geophysicists and engineers to help erase the lines between science and engineering in glaciology.

I’m interested in technical solutions to expand our capacity to collect data about ice sheets and to improve the efficiency with which we can use that data. On the instruments side, I am developing a UAV-borne ice-penetrating radar system capable of collecting information about the internal layers and bedrock topography beneath ice sheets at a fraction of the cost of conventional crewed aircraft systems. On the data side, I have worked on data interpolation methods that leverage physics-informed machine learning to better integrate data with known physics. I am interested in methods that combine data with known physics to improve our understanding of unknown physical processes and in methods for optimizing the collection of data to most efficiently inform these models.

I got my BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. I subsequently worked on UAV perception systems for a commercial medical logistics company before being drawn back to Stanford for my PhD. I try to spend my free time (and at least some of my work time) outdoors, ideally in the mountains or the ocean.