<>  LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

Many congratulations to Mark Cane - we learned earlier this week that he is the recipient of the Robert L. and Bettie P. Cody Award in Ocean Sciences from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.  The Cody Award recognizes outstanding scientific achievement in oceanography, marine biology, and earth science, and consists of a gold medal and a cash prize.  If you see Mark around please congratulate him on this well deserved honor.

We entertained the Chairman and members of the Board of the Doherty Foundation on Wednesday afternoon.  They stayed with us for over five hours and expressed great interest in a wide range of our work, and particularly in some of our technology development efforts.  As with most Foundations, the concern is that they are not supporting competing fiefdoms, they questioned us extensively about the extent of our collaborations with our sister institutions.  Needless to say, we were able to provide excellent assurances about the extent to which our research programs are integrated with those of our colleagues elsewhere.  They expressed great pride in having the name of their Foundation as part of ours and, indeed, admitted that, when asked who they were, typically quoted Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as a part of the explanation!  Obviously, we have an excellent relationship with these great folks and we will be continuing to work with them closely in the coming months and years.

I am very pleased to see the growing level of activity surrounding our recruitment campaign. We have two seminars from two prospective senior hires this week and more in the coming weeks - I encourage everyone to attend these seminars and provide input to the search committees. We will be making final decisions on many of these cases very soon.

I spent an hour on Tuesday afternoon briefing Robert Kasdin, Senior Executive Vice President and Jeffrey Sachs on the status of our operational plans for the R/V Ewing next year, especially with regard to our ability to insure that our seismic operations will not harm the ocean's precious marine mammals. Congratulations to Maya Tostoy, Spahr Webb and John Diebold for so quickly receiving NSF funding for a program to help us carry out careful and quantitative research on this issue.

The report from the workshop that we held before Christmas to plan the midlife refit of the R/V Ewing is complete and will be available for circulation next week. We will be talking to NSF soon about how to proceed from here with our ambitious plans.

Please join me in welcoming Pedro Sanchez  and his staff (Cheryl Palm, Sr. Research Scientist and Lisa Dreier, Program Manager) to the Lamont campus.  Pedro is leading the new Earth Institute program in Tropical Agriculture, and his office is in Lamont Hall for the moment.  I spent an informative hour with Pedro and his staff earlier this week learning of their work and plans, and hope that in the coming weeks he will meet with many of you.

The Earth Institute is holding a day-long retreat tomorrow downtown to kick-off its strategic planning process, so it’s going to be a short weekend for me.  At least it will keep me away from shoveling snow.

Have a great weekend,
 

- Mike