Director's Weekly Reports

Tomorrow, May 19th, 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM, the Lamont - Bright Horizons Child Development Center will be celebrating ten years of service to our community. The center opened in 2000 after an internal study by the Lamont Executive Committee. It was operated by the YMCA for about a year, and has been operated by Bright Horizons since January 2002. Bright Horizons has been lauded as one of Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" and our center has achieved the prestigious accreditation of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)...

Excom this morning: discussion of Columbia's new accounting and reporting system led by Anne Sullivan, Executive VP for Finance (lots of work, lots of staff training, will make things better, please be patient); final iterations on our By-Laws (for discussion in May and voting in June); discussion of our Post-Doc mentoring Plan and its effectiveness in preparing post-docs for career choices (Kuheli will draft some modifications for discussion); various compliance issues (more patience required, some input from Columbia needed). We missed the Enterprise flyover...

Columbia's Morningside Heights campus is one of the great urban spaces, and the first few weeks of spring illustrate the genius of McKim, Mead and White to full effect (if you forget about the 120th street canyon). The Lamont campus, as well, is glorious in the spring; the trees are about to pop, Buildings and Grounds is getting some new plants in the ground, our resident wildlife is doing what wildlife will do at this time of year, and our buildings... well, let's talk about space...

Jim Gaherty, Bruce Shaw and Felix Waldhauser have each been promoted to Lamont Full Research Professor, effective March 1, 2012.  Donna Shillington and Jason Smerdon have been appointed to the Earth Institute faculty --- Congratulations to all.

Howie Matza has organized a webinar presentation Monday, April 2, at 1 PM in the Comer 1st floor seminar room on the subject of lab safety. The webinar is open to all, but is especially important to anyone working in a lab or responsible for the operation of a lab. I've previewed the webinar and recommend your participation. The safety of our staff and
students is paramount, and taking the time to review safety procedures is a fundamental responsibility for all concerned...

The week opened with a wonderful luncheon for Ken Hunkins, organized by Margie Turrin and Barb Charbonnet, with new friends, old friends and old new friends attending. We were able to present Ken with the original map - now mounted and preserved - showing the tracks of all of the drifting ice stations that revolutionized exploration of the Arctic, beginning with Ice Station Alpha during the International Geophysical Year.

We had an executive committee marathon this morning, trying to catch up on several topics.

 I’ve asked Mahdad Parsi, Naomi Naik and Benno Blumenthal to participate in several working groups underneath the “Shared Research Computing Policy Advisory Committee” being run out of Mike Purdy’s EVPR office. These working groups will focus on assessing existing computational resources, enumerating needs for computational power and storage, evaluating cloud architecture and other topics...

A nice surprise this morning: NOAA has announced that:

"Marcus G. Langseth has been selected for a 2011 Voluntary Weather Observing Ship (VOS) Award and Plaque with an outstanding total of 3,749 valuable manual and automated marine observations!   In addition, your ship staff also helped automate observation programs on Roger Revelle and Melville. You will receive your special award later this year.  Once
you have the award, we hope to acquire a digital photo for the Mariner's Weather Log to honor your achievement."...

One of our collective strategies going forward is to broaden our base of funding from traditional sources by developing relationships with other agencies and institutions. Working in our favor is the growing realization in some of these agencies that university-based fundamental research is necessary in its own right and has much to contribute to

their missions and agendas. For example, USAID - an agency with which we have had some past interactions - is in the process of developing an external grants program for universities, meant to support basic research in support of development objectives....

This being the first full week after the holiday break, most of my time was spent in meetings and catching up. Much of the next few weeks will be spent working with Edie and the associate directors preparing the Observatory budget for our next fiscal year. At the same time, we are paying close attention to the federal government's plans for future science agency budgets. Some Lamont and IRI scientists will be visiting Capitol Hill at the end of the month to participate in "Climate
Science Day," organized by the AAAS, AGU, AMS (and other professional organizations), to make the case for the importance of university-based basic research. It's a message that cannot be repeated too frequently...