Elisabeth Doty has a knack for finding stories locked inside data, stories of high tides and rising seas. But finding narratives of climate change wasn’t her original plan; over the course of her five years at the University of Virginia, she said she cycled through every major and life trajectory possible before finding her niche.
“I’d gone through every possible life scenario from joining ROTC to being a pre-med student,” she said.
It was a storytelling course with Anna Katherine Clay, an assistant professor of media studies, that opened her eyes to searching for stories and narrative. The following semester, Doty took a statistics course and realized she could tell stories with data.
Then, in her fourth year, she took two courses with Chris Mooney, a longtime climate reporter who joined UVA’s Environmental Institute as a professor of practice in 2024, and the pair have been working together since.
Coming from The Washington Post, Mooney teaches classes focused on science-centered storytelling and communications. Last December, Mooney published an article in CNN exploring “why the weirdest sea level changes on Earth are happening off the coast of Japan,” with contributed research from Doty.
“We talked to scientists in France at a European atmospheric science agency called Copernicus, who walked us through their data,” she said. “I created the first couple of maps showing sea level rise and current changes in Japan, which ultimately led to what was produced in the CNN story.”