Prof. Zscheischler is an Earth system scientist with a background in mathematics, biogeochemistry and climate science. His research focus are compound weather and climate events, that is, combinations of climatic drivers that contribute to environmental and societal risk. He chaired the European COST Action DAMOCLES (Understanding and modeling compound climate and weather events, 2018-2023), which created a new community of climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers to advance our understanding of compound events. In a recent review four different types of compound events were proposed, with the goal to aid in compound event analysis.

He is leading the group on Compound weather and climate events at UFZ. In his Helmholtz Young Investigator project COMPOUNDX machine learning is used to identify compounding meteorological drivers of extreme impacts such as floods, vegetation mortality and crop failure.

Career