The past week has been one of comings and goings.
The week began with the wonderful news that a new honor has come to Daehyun Kim, who is to receive the 2012 James R. Holton Junior Scientist Award from the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union. The Holton Award is given once a year to recognize outstanding research accomplishments by an early-career scientist. Daehyun joins Arlene Fiore and Tiffany Shaw among the nine winners of this award since its establishment. The award will be given at the AGU Fall Meeting, and I hope that everyone will join me in congratulating Daehyun for this recognition of the impact and promise of his work.
Today, Peter deMenocal shared the equally good news that Hugh Ducklow has accepted the offer from Columbia University of a professorship in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. A biological oceanographer now at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Hugh is an expert in microbial food webs and the role of heterotrophic bacteria in the marine carbon cycle. He currently leads the Palmer Antarctica Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project. We will have the pleasure of welcoming Hugh to Lamont in January.
Today, too, we bid farewell to Scott Nooner, who holds one of the longer titles at Lamont: Palisades Geophysical Institute–Doherty Foundation/Lamont Assistant Research Professor. Scott has accepted a faculty position at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He will be missed at the Observatory for his expertise in seafloor geodesy, mid-ocean ridge processes, and CO2 sequestration studies, but his continuing collaboration with Lamont staff will bring him back to the campus at what we hope will be frequent intervals.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Dave Goldberg and the Office of Marine Operations hosted visits by David Divins, Director of Ocean Drilling Programs at Ocean Leadership, and Brad Clement, Director of Science Services at the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) office at Texas A&M University, to discuss IODP’s future. On Wednesday, the National Science Board approved a one-year extension of the existing cooperative agreement for IODP. There is to be a re-competition for management of the drilling program thereafter.
Lamont’s Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA) project, led by Kerstin Lehnert and Suzanne Carbotte, welcomed joint visits this week by IEDA’s Policy Committee and User Committee. Those committees respectively offer strategic guidance and community feedback on the IEDA team’s mission to provide management and user services for a broad archive of solid-Earth and polar data.
Yesterday, Lamont was visited by a group of World Economic Forum Global Leadership Fellows, as part of a week-long training program organized by Alison Miller and others at the Earth Institute on the general topic of global sustainability and complexity. The Fellows were treated to discussions of natural hazards and risk mitigation by Lamont’s Jim Gaherty and Art Lerner-Lam and IRI’s Dan Osgood, and they were given a tour of the Lamont campus.
Whether these comings and goings have contributed perceptibly to congestion on the George Washington Bridge has not yet been featured in media traffic reports.
Sean