Dr. Pons is an applied climatologist with a background in biology and paleoclimatology who graduated from the University of Denver as a geographer in 2017 funded by a Fulbright scholarship. He comes to CSU after spending the last two years as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist fellow at Columbia University. There, he worked at the intersection between climate and society co-developing seasonal and sub-seasonal forecast systems to support decision-making processes at the farm level in rain-fed agricultural landscapes in Latin America.

His research in mountainous regions of Mesoamerica has been funded by the National Science Foundation, including climate reconstructions in tropical settings using tree-rings. He uses the climate information at different timescales (from months to millennia) to investigate historical and future human-environment interactions and the implications to policy-making and development. His research interests are dendrochronology; climate variability and change; seasonal to sub-seasonal climate forecasts; climate impacts on agriculture; climate-health-migration interactions and satellite-derived vegetation monitoring.