Kelley De Polt is a master’s candidate in the Geography Department at East Carolina University (Greenville, NC, USA). She currently is a graduate intern at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS), working with an interdisciplinary team to determine the frequency in which drought and heat waves co-occur in the United States and their corresponding health impacts. Her thesis work introduces a copula-based approach that can be used to obtain multivariate probabilistic assessments of Compound Coastal Water Event (CCWE) drivers and their corresponding return periods. Analyzing all drivers will provide a better understanding of CCWE and the information produced will be shared directly with key stakeholders in the study region. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Meteorology, with an accompanying minor in computer programming from North Carolina State University (2019). While pursing her undergraduate degree, Kelley served as a research assistant at the North Carolina State Climate Office (NCSCO) for over three years. Here she assisted in the creation of multiple agricultural decision support tools and served as a technical contributor for the North Carolina Climate Science Report which was a was a direct result of Governor Cooper’s Executive Order 80: North Carolina’s Commitment to Address Climate Change and Transition to a Clean Energy Economy. Through these experiences she developed a passion for actionable science within the applied climatology field.