Yochanan Kushnir is a Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, The Earth Institute of Columbia University In the New York, U.S. He joined Lamont as a climate scientist in 1989. From 2003 he has been acting also as the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Climate Applications and Research (CICAR) – a partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Columbia University.

Kushnir received his BSc degree in physics from the Technion and MSc degree in Atmospheric Sciences from Tel Aviv University. In 1985 he received a PhD in Atmospheric Science from Oregon State University. His research has focused on understanding climate variability and change, in particular the role of the oceans in climate variability. He studies mechanisms of natural and externally forced climate variability by analyzing observations, instrumental and paleo-proxies, together with output from global climate models. Kushnir has published on these subjects. He was a co-editor of the AGU Geophysical Monograph Series (2003) The North Atlantic Oscillation: significance and environmental impact, a co-author of the National Research Council report on Climate Variability on Decade-to-Century Time Scales, and a contributing author to the IPPC 2001 Third Assessment Report. His professional affiliations include The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.  

Kushnir has been advising graduate and undergraduate students and teaching at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the School of International and Public Affairs. In the fall of 2011 and early 2012 he taught and conducted research a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.