Eli Schwat

Eli grew up in Maryland and spent his childhood on the waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. While attending Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, Eli's appreciation for the outdoors grew alongside his interest in earth and environmental sciences, which began in a Geomorphology class taken during his freshman year. After graduating in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Eli worked for two years as a software engineer at CIBO Technologies, using field data to improve corn and soy crop models and scaling model runs across the United States.

Eli began as a graduate student at University of Washington in August of 2020 and defended his master's thesis in September 2022. Eli's passion for geophysics, hydrology, and field work led him to his current position in the Mountain Hydrology Research Group, studying the sublimation of snow in collaboration with the Aspen Global Change Institute. If you can't find him in the "treehouse" of Wilcox Hall (at the University of Washington), you might find Eli car camping in the Cascades, skiing near Snoqualmie Pass, or in his kitchen cooking something that takes way too long.