Rate My Professor Florian Mekhaldi

Florian Mekhaldi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, a position he has held since September 2024. As a paleoclimatologist, his research specializes in reconstructing past changes in climate and solar activity by measuring and analyzing cosmogenic radionuclides, including 10Be, 14C, and 36Cl, in environmental archives such as ice cores and sedimentary records. This work enables the reconstruction of solar activity, the discovery and quantification of ancient solar storms, and the development of robust timescales for paleoclimate studies. A key interest is determining the frequency of extreme solar storms throughout the Holocene and their effects on Earth's atmosphere and potential impacts on modern society. He is affiliated with the Bolin Centre for Climate Research and welcomes motivated students for projects in paleo-climate science or solar activity.

Mekhaldi obtained his PhD in Geobiosphere Sciences, specializing in Quaternary Geology, from Lund University in 2019. He previously earned an MSc in Geology, specializing in Quaternary Sciences, from Lund University in 2014, and a BSc in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis in France in 2011. His career includes a postdoctoral position at Lund University from 2019 to 2023, a Visiting Research Fellowship at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, from 2021 to 2022, and another at CEREGE in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2023. Key publications include 'Multiradionuclide evidence for the solar origin of the cosmic-ray events of AD 774/5 and 993/4' in Nature Communications (2015), 'Multiradionuclide evidence for an extreme solar proton event around 2,610 B.P.' in PNAS (2019), and 'Cosmogenic radionuclides reveal an extreme solar particle storm near a solar minimum 9125 years BP' in Nature Communications (2022). His research has amassed over 2,199 citations on Google Scholar. In 2019, he was honored as an Outstanding Reviewer for AGU journals. At Stockholm University, he teaches courses like Scientific Methods in Physical Geography and has secured external research grants, including from Vetenskapsrådet for decoding centuries of extreme space weather.