Gutzler is a climatologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. He is the 2018 recipient of the Annual Community Engaged Research Lectureship Award. The award honors scholars whose work is academically relevant but also affects the wider community.
Gutzler is a renowned scholar on climate science. His research on seasonal climate predictive ability regarding winter precipitation was incorporated into seasonal forecast predictions by the National Weather Service. He was also a lead author on the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report, a main source for the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change Mitigation.
He recently gave his talk, "The Science and Politics of Climate Change: Tales of a Turbulent System" as part of the lectureship award.