The Lamont Campus was saddened to learn this week of the death of former Lamont laboratory technician and analyst Nadia Kostyk. Nadia worked at the Observatory for more than two decades, from August 1966 until September 1987, initially as a Senior Research Staff Assistant and later as a Staff Associate. A few reminiscences by Lamont alumnus and Adjunct Senior Research Scientist Richard Bopp can be found on our web site (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/files/uploaded/image/file/Nadia%20Kostyk.pdf).
Balancing the loss was a mix of good news and reports of progress on many fronts.
Lamont Advisory Board chair Sarah Johnson had much to celebrate after Sunday’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards ceremony. “Birdman,” for which Sarah served as Executive Producer, received the Oscar for Best Picture.
And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced this week that Tiffany Shaw is among the winners of a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship, awarded to early-career scientists (http://www.sloan.org/fileadmin/media/files/srf/APS_2015_Research_Fellowships_ad_FINAL.pdf).
To Sarah and Tiffany, our congratulations!
Last weekend, Lamont was one of 70 academic institutions, associations, and consortia to co-sign a letter sent to key leaders in Congress on the importance of strong federal support for research in the geosciences, particularly at the National Science Foundation, to the national economy and the health and security of our citizens. The letter, prepared by Joel Widder at Federal Science Partners along with others, was sent to the Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce, and Transportation; the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology; and that committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Technology.
The Ocean and Climate Physics Division is hosting the sabbatical visit this semester of Faye McNeill from Columbia University’s Department of Chemical Engineering. Faye specializes in laboratory and modeling studies of atmospheric aerosols and ice in the environment (http://cheme.columbia.edu/v-faye-mcneill). At Lamont she is working with Arlene Fiore and her group to incorporate aqueous pathways of secondary organic aerosol formation into global atmospheric chemistry models. Atmospheric distributions of secondary organic aerosols are not well known, and models typically predict values lower than available observations. This collaborative effort will enable an evaluation of the contribution of aqueous formation of secondary organic aerosols to global and regional atmospheric composition and will be a step toward assessing the implications of these processes for Earth’s climate system.
On Monday, I joined Dean of Engineering Mary Boyce on a visit to the Mailman School of Public Health hosted by Dean Linda Fried and the chair of the school’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Tomás Guilarte. The object of the visit was to explore opportunities to expand collaborative research efforts in areas for which Lamont, the Mailman School, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science have complementary strengths. We agreed as a next step to hold meetings among interested faculty on topics of particular promise; the first such meeting, most likely some time in late spring, will be on hydraulic fracturing.
Also on Monday, Lamont’s Development Office distributed copies of the Observatory’s 2014 Annual Report. Edited by Rebecca Fowler, the report includes stories on Lamont’s programs in research, education, development, and alumni activities. There is an overview of Lamont’s revenues and expenses for the past fiscal year and words of appreciation for the Observatory’s donors over the same time period. To any who missed the report, a copy is posted online (http://blog.ldeo.columbia.edu/2014report/).
On Monday evening, Columbia University’s World Leaders Forum launched the new Lamont and Columbia University initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate, led by Adam Sobel, with a panel discussion on “Preparing for extreme weather: Global lessons from Sandy” (http://www.worldleaders.columbia.edu/events/preparing-extreme-weather-global-lessons-sandy). After an introduction by Mike Purdy, Adam made opening remarks and introduced panelists Daniel Zarrilli, Director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency; IRI’s Lisa Goddard; Mike Gerrard, Director of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law; and Radley Horton from the Center for Climate Systems Research. A new website for the Extreme Weather and Climate initiative was also launched this week (http://wordpress.ei.columbia.edu/weather/). Earlier in the day, Adam spoke about climate change at TEDx Broadway 2015 (http://www.tedxbroadway.com/tedxbroadway-2015/).
Tuesday and Wednesday marked the visit to Columbia of the external committee to review the Earth Institute – Christopher Boone, Dean and Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University; George Philander, the Knox Taylor Professor of Geoscience at Princeton University (who was battling the flu and participated by teleconference); and Maria Zuber, the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Vice President for Research at MIT. The committee visited Lamont on Wednesday to hear about the breadth of research being conducted on this campus and in partnership with EI units at the Mailman School and on the Morningside Campus. Participants joining me in the discussion with the committee included Robin Bell, Kathy Callahan, Nick Frearson, Dave Goldberg, Yochanan Kushnir, Art Lerner-Lam, Kerstin Lehnert, Christine McCarthy, Pratigya Polissar, Mo Raymo, Richard Seager, and Park Williams from the Observatory; Peter deMenocal and Göran Ekström from the Observatory and DEES; Kevin Griffin from the Observatory, DEES, and EEEB; Bob Chen and Alex de Sherbinin from CIESIN; Andy Robertson from IRI; and Cheryl Palm and Pedro Sanchez from the Agriculture and Food Security Center.
On Thursday, Kevin Krajick posted an invitation to a workshop on how best to speak with media and policy makers. The half-day workshop, to be held at Lamont in six weeks, will be “aimed at giving scientists the skills to communicate with journalists and policymakers in clear, lively and effective fashion.” If you haven’t participated in one of these workshops before, I encourage you to do so. An RSVP to Kevin (kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu) is required to hold a seat in the audience.
Several Lamont scientists have been featured in news articles this week. In a story on NBC News, Chris Zappa was quoted on the use of airborne drones to gather in situ measurements in scientifically important settings too challenging for ships and aircraft (http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/eco-drones-aid-researchers-fight-save-environment-n309131). Robin Bell was interviewed for a New York Times article on winter ice on the Hudson River (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/21/nyregion/under-frozen-tundra-an-icebreaking-ship-uncovers-the-hudson.html). Dennis Kent commented in a story in Science on the proposal by New York University’s Michael Rampino that terrestrial impact by dark matter may have contributed to one or more of the major extinction events in Earth history (http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2015/02/did-dark-matter-kill-dinosaurs). Brendan Buckley was asked by CBS News for remarks on an article suggesting that climate change played a role in the spread of bubonic plague in medieval Europe (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-climate-change-have-brought-plague-to-medieval-europe/). And Jason Smerdon is quoted in a New Yorker article on the effect of climate change on the increasing severity of droughts and floods over the rest of this century (http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/coming-water-wars).
This afternoon, rock deformation expert Phil Skemer, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis (http://espm.wustl.edu/people/skemer/), will give the Earth Science Colloquium. Phil’s lecture will be on “Rock deformation in the upper mantle: Experimental and geological perspectives.” There’s no need to get bent out of shape, but I hope that you’ll be able to attend the talk.
Sean