The Alumni Board: Greetings from the President

I am the new President of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Alumni Association Board Having studied with Peter deMenocal, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, and several other wonderful folks, I finished my paleoclimatology PhD in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in 2005. Since then, I have been teaching at Hofstra University on Long Island. I’m honored to follow in Greg Mountain’s footsteps as President and to carry on the Board’s mission to advocate for the welfare of the Observatory.

As the summer is winding down, the Board initiative that I am proudest of is the mentoring network that we are putting together. The plan is to enable current graduate students to meet with two LDEO alumni -- one from industry and the other from academia -- to network and to ask career-related questions. These meetings will be facilitated by Board members, and will occur monthly in Fall 2018.  If this project interests you, your help has the potential to be most useful to graduate students as they begin to plan their futures.  Please contact me for more details if you would like to participate, or if you would just like to comment on or find out more about this effort.  I’m all ears!

Another Board project is the sponsorship of an annual “Superstar” Alumni speaker, who will spend several days visiting with students and others in the LDEO community, and then give a talk on the LDEO Friday afternoon Colloquium series. The identity of the 2018 speaker will remain a surprise until officially announced, but the last several “superstar” visits have been big successes and I’ll be very excited to attend.

I am also very excited about the LDEO Open House scheduled for Saturday, October 13, 2018, and the annual party that LDEO and DEES will be hosting at the Fall AGU meeting in DC. I hope to see you at some of these events!

Please contact me or Stacey Vassallo in the Development Office (staceyv@ldeo.columbia.edu)  if there are additional features you'd like to find here on our website. 

Thanks,