Sylvia Reeves

National Integrated Drought Information System

Sylvia Reeves is the National Integrated Drought Information System’s northeast drought information coordinator. She came to this position with the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in June 2020, just as the northeast plunged into its third significant drought since 2000. Sylvia’s undergraduate degree is in Atmospheric Sciences from Cornell University, and her master’s degree is in science policy from North Carolina State University. From her early days at Cornell, she felt a strong calling to focus on applied science–through a multidisciplinary lens–to address the impacts of all natural hazards. This focus drove her career in the military (U.S. Air Force weather officer), in emergency management (State of Connecticut) and in both the private and public sectors. For the Northeast Drought Early Warning System position, Reeves returned to her old stomping grounds and is embedded with the Northeast Regional Climate Center team at Cornell. Reeves lives in the Ithaca, New York area and enjoys cooking, snowshoeing, sledding, watching movies, studying science and history, and taking short hikes of the region’s gorges to photograph the waterfalls.