Rachel Pike knows the intricacies of climate research — the laborious, exacting and subtle techniques behind findings that end up in IPCC reports and, later, news headlines.

As a Ph.D candidate at Cambridge, Pike’s research on isoprene, a major biofuel crop emission, and other molecules has taken her soaring over rainforest canopies in multi-ton labs-on-wings, into the cooled-down sub-levels of supercomputer grids, and into massive experimental atmospheric chambers. Her exhaustive work represents a major step toward a complete picture of how human activity affects the global ecosystem.

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