Director's Weekly Reports

We have settled upon Friday, September 24th for the event to recognize the life and science John Diebold. We are preparing formal invitations and will circulate widely as soon as possible.  It will be in the Monell Auditorium from 1:30pm til 4:30pm with a reception to follow...

I met John Diebold in the middle seventies, the time when he, along with Paul Stoffa and Peter Buhl and several others were convincing the world that all seismic structure problems could be solved with big airgun arrays, long hydrophone streamers, expanding spread profiles and tau-p space. At the time I remained conservatively entrenched in the old school of marine seismology, espousing the superior signal-to-noise ratios available when 500 pound charges of TNT were detonated. We shared a cabin for two months in 1979 aboard the Conrad in the Eastern Pacific during the ill-fated ROSE experiment and had many discussions about the pros and cons of various approaches to marine seismics.

If there is one problem that never goes away - it is the problem of space. There is never enough of it, and on the rare occasion that thereis, then it is in the wrong place.  It is very healthy that we arealways feeling space pressure because it means that we are growing - bringing in new resources - and as the ~$16M that we (or more correctly you - the PIs) won in federal stimulus grants this year beginsto get spent (i.e. new people hired) the pressure to find space to put them grows.  I had several meetings this week focused upon trying to solve specific problems - and there will be more in the coming weeks and months. One good piece of news on this front is that the competitive process to select the architect and construction manager for the New Core Lab renovation project is complete and so, finally, we are a few weeks away from finishing off the award negotiations with NSF. In the short term, of course, this project will only add to our space woes because we shall have to find swing space to house folks temporarily as the second floor of the New Core lab gets completely taken apart and rebuilt...

What can I say?  I have never been...

We held the seventh annual Mentoring Award event earlier this afternoon - there were seven excellent nominees for the award - all of whom deserve recognition and thanks for the positive impact they have on the Observatory.  The nominees were Nick Christie-Blick, Ed Cook, Sid Hemming, Juerg Matter, Naomi Naik, Adam Sobel and Maya Tolstoy. The selection Committee chaired by Chris Zappa had a tough time selecting one awardee from this list of great nominees, but as those of you who attended the ceremony this afternoon already know - this year's awardee was Adam Sobel of the Ocean and Climate Physics Division.  Many thanks to Chris Zappa and his committee for leading this process and especially thanks to Alexey Kaplan for stepping in to help out this afternoon while Chris was out of town...

ExCom this morning turned into a marathon, lasting almost three hours.

Three new appointments as DARS were considered and discussion topics ranged from addressing the neglected issue of the important role that Project Scientists play in the Observatory to consideration of new formal policies to improve the quality of mentoring that we provide for post docs.  Jim Cochran took over from Chris Small as the MG&G representative and Donna Shillington replaced Andreas Thurnherr as the Junior Staff rep...

It has been a very busy week - nine different appointments in my diary for today - but at least they were all here at Lamont. Yesterday I had to make two separate trips downtown - the first was for the annual formal budget presentation with the Provost (which is always so much fun), and the second was for the last EI Faculty meeting of the academic year - at which the keynote speaker was... the Provost...

while simultaneously grappling with the realities of getting our research vessel, Langseth, out of the shipyard in Portland Oregon and through all the necessary Coast Guard inspections so she can sail west across the Pacific to begin her 2010 field season. Ship operations are such a joy...

It is our Alumni Spring Pubic Lecture this Sunday - Jerry McManus is giving a talk with the acutely alliterative title  - Currents, Conveyors and Climate Change. This is very timely in many ways - because a week today we celebrate 50 years as a DEES Professor for the father of the conveyor belt idea - Wally Broecker. ..

Busy week with the huge 'State of the Planet' conference going on down town, as well as the formal 'kick-off' meeting with Program Managers from NIST marking the start of the project to construct the worlds largest and most capable ultra clean lab for Geochemistry in the Comer Building. NIST is providing us with ~$1.4M to support this...