Dr. Jorns is the Director for GLISA at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. In this role, Dr. Jorns oversees all GLISA’s day-to-day operations and long-term planning and strategic leadership of GLISA to make key decisions and represent the program to sponsors, partners, the media, and elected officials. She also recruits new faculty, convenes GLISA’s advisory boards, leads interdisciplinary research proposals and projects, publishes results in scholarly journals, and represents GLISA on the CAP Executive Committee. She also provides day-to-day leadership and administration of GLISA operations to ensure the goals of the 2021-2026 program and all external awards are being achieved. Dr. Jorns supervises staff and students and coordinates faculty research at GLISA’s four partner institutions. She was previously the Program Manager from 2017-2022 and the Co-Director for 2022-2024.

Since joining GLISA in 2017, she was a co-author of the Midwest chapter of the 4th National Climate Assessment and was a Co-Principal Investigator on two GLISA multi-institution research projects focused on stormwater management and remote engagement in the Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico. She also participated in GLISA’s internal evaluation of its Small Grants Program (Jorns et al. 2021), facilitated the 2021 Great Lakes Climate Modeling Workshop (Briley and Jorns 2021), and led the 2023 CAP Executive Committee. She also contributed to breakthrough research on lake-atmosphere interactions in climate modeling (Notaro et al. 2022) and scenario planning (Oriol et al. 2024). In 2021, she was instrumental in coordinating GLISA’s Phase III proposal to win five more years of core CAP funding through 2026. And finally, she oversaw GLISA’s 2024 Small Grants Program competition and the launch of 10 new grant projects. She is now a co-author on the Midwest chapter of the 6th National Climate Assessment. 

Prior to joining GLISA and the University of Michigan in January 2017, Dr. Jorns worked as a Policy Associate with The Climate Registry in Los Angeles to maintain existing and develop new greenhouse gas accounting policies. She previously worked to improve energy efficiency and clean energy initiatives in Los Angeles with Global Green USA. She has a PhD in Geosciences from Princeton University, where she studied the response of marine phytoplankton to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. She also received a science, technology, and environmental policy certificate from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.