Ashesh Chattopadhyay

Ashesh Chattopadhyay is an assistant professor in the department of applied mathematics and an affiliate faculty with the center for generative AI at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is the recipient of the 2026 Alfred. P. Sloan Research fellowship, the 2026 SIAM Mathematics of Planet Earth Early Career Prize, and the 2025 American Physical Society Topical Group in Physics of Climate Early Career Award. Ashesh’s interests lie at the intersection of theoretical deep learning and computational physics for applications in atmospheric and engineering turbulence. Ashesh did his PhD from Rice University, his M.S from the University of Texas, El Paso, and his B-Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Patna. Prior to joining UCSC he was a staff research scientist at Xerox PARC and then at SRI.

AI2050 Project

The most damaging climate events, such as extreme hurricanes, heatwaves, and floods, are rare and may not appear in historical data, making them difficult to predict with today’s AI models. Chattopadhyay’s project develops a new type of AI system that can discover physically possible extreme events that have never been observed before. It does this by fusing AI with statistical physics, which provides a mathematical language for how complex systems make rare jumps from one stable state to another. Instead of only learning from past data, the system uses this physics to explore how the climate could evolve, searching for realistic pathways to extreme conditions rather than simply repeating what it has seen. This approach could help scientists, governments, and industries better understand future risks, improving disaster preparedness and decision-making in a world where unprecedented events are becoming increasingly likely.