Climate Scientist Peter Huybers, Health Administrator Downing Lu Named Interim Kirkland House Faculty Deans

Earth and Planetary Sciences department chair Peter J. Huybers and Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative senior fellow Downing Lu will serve as Kirkland House’s interim faculty deans, outgoing Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced in an email to Kirkland affiliates Tuesday.

Huybers and Lu will assume their new roles on July 1. They will succeed outgoing faculty deans David J. Deming and Janine M. Santimauro, who announced that they would step down at the end of June after Deming was selected as the next dean of the College in May.

Huybers came to Harvard as a professor in 2007. Huybers has chaired EPS since 2023 and also holds an Environmental Science and Engineering faculty appointment in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a degree in physics and received his Ph.D. in climate physics and chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004.

Huybers’ research focuses on climate change, including its effects on water and agriculture and the reconstruction of climate conditions over a geological time scale.

Lu is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, which convenes leaders from around the world to address pressing social issues. She graduated from West Point before receiving an M.D. from Tulane University School of Medicine and an M.P.H from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lu, a pediatrician, has been a high-ranking administrator at several military health care systems and is a U.S. Army colonel.

“Peter and Downing exemplify lives dedicated to making meaningful contributions—across science, medicine, public health, education, and global affairs,” Khurana wrote. “They believe in building a more just and sustainable world.”

Huybers and Lu have two teenage sons and a cat, Pemi.

Deming and Santimauro have served as Kirkland House faculty deans since 2020, when they were appointed amid one of the largest periods of House administrator turnover in decades.

The search for Kirkland House’s permanent faculty deans will begin in the fall, Khurana wrote in May.

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.