Director's Weekly Reports

We hosted the MARGINS Program national steering committee on Monday, under the leadership of Geoff Abers - they are preparing for a major review in the coming months that will shape the size and direction of the program for the next decade.  Needless to say everyone is hopeful that the arrival of a marine geophysicist (Bob Detrick) as the new Division Director for the Earth Sciences Division (he starts on Monday) will result in renewed interest from the solid earth side of NSF in the support of ocean margin research.

I was fortunate to spend time with Lee Goldman on Tuesday ( Exec VP for Health Sciences and Dean of the Faculties of Health Science and Medicine) - he runs the Medical center which constitutes something close to half of the whole of CU.  The subject of the meeting was exclusively our initiative to establish research professorships at LDEO - we share many of the same issues (though on a slightly different scale!) - and I was very pleased by how much understanding and support that I received - a very positive step forward.

The press release went out yesterday announcing that Walter Alvarez of  UC Berkeley is the winner of the 2008 Vetlesen Prize (see our web page for details).  I am extremely pleased with this selection - Walter is a wonderful  person (and an ex-Lamonter - Doc Ewing's last post doc apparently) - and we greatly look forward to hosting him for the medal 
ceremony, to be presided over by Lee Bollinger in Low Library on November 21st.  It is a testament to his continued active involvement in geological research and education that it took me a week to track him down and give him the good news - because he was in the field outside cell phone coverage.

It has taken too long for me to live up to a promise that I made to everyone at a Lamont-wide meeting in early 2007 - but finally we now have a new full-time position in the Director's office with the title Assistant Director for Academic Affairs and Diversity.  Dr Kuheli Dutt joined us on Monday of this week to take on this new role. She will have a steep learning curve in the coming months as she learns the unique characteristics of this complex organism that is Lamont, and I hope everyone will offer help and support as appropriate. Kuheli's appointment is one of the most substantial steps we have taken in our mission to continuously improve the quality of the work environment on campus. Naturally she will be working closely with Robin Bell and the ADVANCE program.

The dinner to celebrate the award of the Vetlesen Prize for 2008 will be held (in the Low Library) on November 21st. I am not free to announce the identity of the awardee (who will receive a cheque for $250,000) for another week or so, but as in previous years we have identified a great leader in our field whose name will add further prestige to the Prize and to the great Foundation that supports it.

Speaking of awards, I was extremely pleased to learn this week that our own Won-Young Kim has won much deserved recognition from the Seismological Society of America for his outstanding contributions to observational seismology by winning the Jesuit Seismological Association Award. The Jesuits played a substantial role in the early development of global observational seismology, and to have Won-Young honored by such an historic group is indeed a testament to his contributions.

  On Tuesday we had a visit from Anne Taylor from the senior leadership of the CU Medical Center - the primary agenda was concerned with our Research Professor initiative - there is interest in this because, not surprisingly, the issues that we have at Lamont are not completely unique. I have a significant meeting with the Executive Committee of the Engineering School on Monday for this very same reason.

     I met briefly with the Campus Life Committee on Wednesday - something I must do on a more regular basis, but in this case specifically to welcome Jason Smerdon into his new role as Chair of
this important group.

     I spent a large part of Friday on the Cross Bronx Expressway as an inevitable consequence of the need to attend a day-long meeting at Stony Brook. It was the inaugural meeting of the NY Marine Science Consortium - we are one of the founding members, and I am on the Executive Committee - 26 full members so far - academic institutions
around the state. The goal is to get the State better educated about the resource it holds in its world class universities - that are capable of generating the knowledge that the State so desperately requires if it is to tackle its many marine environmental issues with wisdom and effectiveness.

The crew and technicians on board Langseth are taking a well earned break in Astoria Oregon right now. They sail on Wednesday next week, north to Alaska, for a cruise led by Sean Gullick and Gail Christeson of UTIG - the last cruise of the year.

Steve Goldstein and I had a very important meeting on Wednesday morning with the chairs of the basic science departments within Arts and Sciences - talking about our research professor initiative. I think we made good progress - there is a growing understanding of the uniqueness of Lamont, and of the priority associated with the development of new positions for our superb research staff.

I got into science in the beginning via a misguided interest in high energy nuclear physics. So I was fully embroiled in quantum mechanics and all its bizarre predictions - several of which Einstein himself did not believe. One of the more intriguing predictions of quantum mechanics is that, given the right conditions, a particle can change the properties of another particle, no matter how far apart they are, and it can do this instantaneously - repeat instantaneously.  The
August 14 issue of Nature reports an experiment that claims to prove this (over a separation distance of 18 km) - establishing that, within their experimental resolution, the definition of 'instantaneously' is at least four orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light.  The closing sentence of the paper (by Salart et al on p861, and, I repeat,
this is in Nature) states "To maintain an explanation based on spooky action at a distance we would have to assume that the spooky action propagates at speeds even greater than the bounds of our experiment"  i.e. faster than four orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. (Please note that neither italics nor quotation marks were used
in this sentence). Apparently 'spooky action' was a phrase used by Einstein to dismiss this phenomena (which he believed revealed a failing of quantum mechanics).  I am glad we do not work on this stuff at Lamont - I would never know when to take folks seriously... but I have to admit, this is indeed... spooky.

Summer is ending - classes begin September 2nd and we welcome the 57 new graduate students (yes - 57) joining the Department at a party behind Lamont Hall, 5 pm  Wednesday August 27th.  All are welcome - please join Steve Goldstein, the new Chair of DEES, and me to help make the new students feel at home.

This has been a jumbled week of random activity, interspersed with sleepless nights worrying about the ongoing 3D cruise on Langseth - all is going well out there right now, they have completed their first grid - but there always seems to be an infinitesimally small divide between success and some new and complex setback.

Dean of Engineering Jerry Navratil visited on Wednesday and EVP for Research David Hirsh visited on Thursday. With the migration of Geochemists into the Comer building we need to face some difficult space decisions and I spent some time on Monday with Roger Buck and Pat O'Reilly, walking around, looking at ways to make better use of our available square footage.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the blood drive this past  week - and especially to the folks who organised it.  Mundane stuff, I  know, but really important - thank you.

Congratulations to Suzana Camargo - just appointed as a Doherty  Associate Research Scientist in Ocean and Climate Physics (OCP). She  works on understanding hurricanes and tropical cyclones and how they  are influenced by ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) and is a great  addition to our climate group, working to understand short term  impacts of climate change.

Thank you to Jason Smerdon - Storke-Doherty Lecturer also in OCP - for  agreeing to take over leadership of the Campus Life Committee from  Mary Reagan, who has done a tremendous and much-appreciated job over  the past four years as the founding chair of this important group.

There was a great turnout for todays Research Life session - an  interactive session on working with the media - led by Rich Hayes from  the Union of Concerned Scientists. Kevin Krajick and I will be  collecting input from folks over the next week or so to determine how  effective it was and decide whether we want to repeat the session next  summer, or modify it in some way.  A week today - Friday July 25th  330pm in Lamont Hall - the next session will be on 'Washington DC and  Proposal Writing' - panelists will include Art Lerner Lam, Yochanan  Kushnir and a real, live, practicing NSF program manager from the  Ocean Sciences Division who has promised to tell ALL the secrets of  how decisions are made about our proposals!

This has been a blessedly quiet week which has allowed some small degree of 'catching-up' to occur in my office.  I do not know whether the fact that 'catching-up' seems to be synonymous with filling several recycling bins with paper, should concern me or not.

As we approach the celebration of this nations successful detachment from the power of the English monarchy, it was with particular interest that I received the latest fund-raising request from the alma mater of many members of the British royal family (and me, by the way!) Cambridge - reminding us all that next year 2009 will be the University's 800th Anniversary (it was founded in 1209 by an exodus of scholars from the University of Oxford who got into a dispute with the local townsfolk (it was kind-of-like a Manhattanville situation I think). So presumably Cambridge's 800th will be more than three times larger and grander than Columbia's recent 250th celebration!