Dr. Penner's resume includes over 110 peer-reviewed publications in the scientific literature which range from studies of stratospheric chemistry and ozone change, regional and urban air pollution, nuclear war effects on global climate, and chemical and aerosol effects on radiation and climate. She is a leading expert on the interactions of chemistry, aerosols, and their effects on the climate system and has played an active role in recognition of the effect of aerosols on climate, organizing several meetings including, most recently, the 8th International Conference on Carbonaceous Particles in the Atmosphere. She has served on several scientific advisory committees, including most recently, acting as Chairman of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Geosciences, and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Metrics for Global Change Research and the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Aerosol Forcing and Climate Change. She is frequently asked to give invited talks and symposia to a variety of academic and industrial groups as well as to national and international panels. She was recently elected as Chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Section on Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences and was made a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1999. She had the great honor of being nominated by the U.S. Government and then chosen to lead a chapter (which was published in 2001) and book (which was published in 1999) for two of the assessment reports carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is currently serving on the IPCC panel’s Fourth Assessment Report.

Prior to joining the University in 1996, Dr. Penner was a Group Leader in Atmospheric Sciences at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. While there, she developed simplified treatments for the sulfur cycle within a global climate model and used this model to quantify the climate forcing and climate response from anthropogenic sulfate aerosols. This work has had a major effect in understanding how climate has changed over the last hundred years. Similar types of analyses have been followed in detection studies since the initial detection work which was co-authored by Dr. Penner. In 1993, Joyce was appointed Division Leader of the Global Climate Research Division at LLNL. In this capacity, she had responsibility for developing, conducting and supervising research programs in the Global Climate Research Division which were aimed at evaluating the role of fossil fuel emissions in altering biogeochemical cycles and climate. Under her leadership, a modeling effort aimed at the evaluation of the global carbon cycle was initiated. Joyce's own research continued to emphasize issues involved in determining climate forcing by changes to atmospheric aerosols and tropospheric ozone. She joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1996 and has continued breaking new ground in aerosol/climate studies with the first studies of climate forcing by carbonaceous aerosols in 1998 (Penner et al., 1998), the first mechanistic studies which treat the indirect forcing by anthropogenic sulfate as well as carbonaceous aerosols (Chuang et al., 2002), and the first study of the effects of carbonaceous aerosols on the lifetime and precipitation efficiency of clouds (Penner et al., 2003). She has also recently led a model intercomparison study that evaluated the differences between satellite-derived estimates of aerosol forcing and model-derived estimates (Penner et al., 2001).