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!
On Monday evening I go down to NSF - mostly to talk about Langseth operations in 2010 - but importantly I will be meeting with the new head of the Geosciences Directorate Tim Killeen - the man who controls almost $1billion dollars a year in University-based research funding for Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric sciences. I am sure many of you know
Tim from his years as Director of NCAR and as President of AGU, but I shall be very interested to hear his perspectives on the future of GEO within NSF.
After suffering some very painful problems with the compressors last week, Langseth is back operating on the East Pacific Rise under the leadership of John Mutter and Suzanne Carbotte - all four 6 kilometer long streamers are out, the sources are firing - and all is well. Lets hope it stays that way!!
Apologies to the folks in Geosciences today - no air conditioning - as Bob Chen said - it was getting a little 'toasty'! We hope to have the new chiller operating by the end of the day so all will be cool and comfortable for Monday.
Have a great weekend,
- Mike