Director's Weekly Reports

The temperature right now here in Moscow is minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit. It is predicted to rise to 3 degrees in the middle of the day, so folks are generally pleased that the 'cold snap' is coming to an end!!  I am here for a three day meeting of the heads of the major ocean institutions around the world, an annual event that rotates around the big ocean centers. (The host here is the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology.)  It is a rare opportunity to talk with ocean leadership from everywhere from Australia to South Africa, including Spain, Germany, France, UK, Korea, China, Japan etc. etc...

Since I have been Director, I have not started a New Year with such prospects for activity and change in so many different areas of the institution. Although essentially all of this is good, change inevitably brings a lot of work and many tough decisions. This time next year many things will be different. My relatively robust predictions for the New Year include:

    - The beginning of major work on the complete renovation of the top
      floor of the New Core Lab to give the BPE Division the quality
      laboratory facilities they have needed desperately for years ...

t has been a crazy week in San Francisco - so many sessions and meetings get scheduled on top of one another - so it is inevitable that I miss about as many important events as I am able to attend.  But I did manage to make it to a few science sessions - oral and postal - and needless to say, saw many Lamonters.

The Alumni Association reception on Tuesday evening followed a good meeting of the Board, and was well attended despite the financial cost associated with consumption of alcohol. As always there were lots of old and new friends from all over the world there...

I spent Wednesday and Thursday in College Station, Texas meeting with NSF leadership about the future of the ocean drilling program (ODP) - it was colder in Houston and College Station than it was in New York - much to my surprise.  Believe it or not ODP is up for renewal again in 2013 so already it is time to start thinking about plans and strategies.
We had dinner at the Dean's house (Kate Miller) on Wednesday night and who should turn up but Andy Fisher and Keir Becker - had not seen either of them for a couple of years - good to catch up. I want to invite Andy to Lamont to give the great talk he gave at the INVEST meeting in Bremen earlier this year...

Barb Charbonnet and I had a very pleasant lunch with the leadership of the Vetlesen Foundation on Wednesday - providing our annual report of progress and accomplishments, which was received positively (thank goodness!). However, their views (from their "Wall Street" perspective) on the financial future at a national level were depressingly negative - I hope in this case their pessimism is unfounded...

We received a second piece of good news this week - from NIST to whom we submitted a $1.5M proposal for Federal Stimulus funds to complete the ultra clean lab in Comer - we have reached the second round of the review process in this competition too. So there will be a lot of crossed fingers around here over the next few weeks...

We made another step towards the final implementation of the Research Professor positions at an important meeting with representatives of the CU Controller and Research Compliance offices on Monday. Our plans for the transition years, during which folks move from 12 month positions to 9 month positions, are complex from an effort reporting perspective - but the startegy that we had worked out with ExCom was found to be without flaws.  So one more hurdle has been crossed.

Columbia University, at the highest levels, is engaged in a 're-branding' initiative and is requiring that all Schools move away from their own logos and identity, and adopt a uniform 'look' in which Columbia University itself is clear and prominent. The new CU-approved Lamont identity can be found at, and downloaded from:  http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/campus-services/ldeo-logo So, from now on, this is what you should be using on your powerpoints or whatever....

eff Sachs spent the day on the Lamont Campus on Monday, meeting for two hours with the LDEO ExCom in the morning and then visiting with the leadership of IRI, CIESIN and Tropical Agriculture through the afternoon. This presented a much-welcomed opportunity to engage Jeff in our research goals and resulted in some excellent discussions.

It was great to see Lamont alumnus John Hall on Tuesday and hear his intriguing stories of the development of a hovercraft for research in the ice covered Arctic Ocean. This was an all-too-rare-example of very high-risk innovation in approaches to data collection - a characteristic of our research world that has almost disappeared to zero (but thankfully not quite) since the demise of ONR funding for blue water ocean science...

There was a great talk this afternoon - this years 'Science of Diversity' talk at the regular colloquium - Meg Urry, the Chair of the Physics department at Yale did a superb job of reviewing the issues that cause there to be so few women in research science. This was a welcome intellectual break from a marathon ExCom this  morning and a DEES Faculty meeting (attended by Arts and Sciences VP Nick Dirks) this afternoon...