The spring season is eagerly awaited. Splashes of forsythia, daffodils, and tulips in the area suggest that the greening of the campus is not far off.
This is the week of the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria. At that meeting, Göran Ekström was awarded the Beno Gutenberg Medal from EGU’s Seismology Division. Göran received the medal “for contributions to the understanding of the elastic (particularly anisotropic) and anelastic structure of the Earth, and for understanding and characterising seismic sources, especially unusual ones such as ‘ice-quakes’ or the Earth’s low frequency ‘hum’” (http://www.egu.eu/awards-medals/beno-gutenberg/2015/goran-ekstrom/). Göran also delivered the Beno Gutenberg Medal Lecture on the “Detection, location, and analysis of seismic surface waves” (http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2015/EGU2015-15341.pdf). Lamont was well represented at the meeting and in the audience for Göran’s medal lecture.
On Monday, Kaori Tsukui successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, completed under the supervision of Sid Hemming, on the topic of “Chronology and faunal evolution of the Middle Eocene Bridgerian North American Land Mammal Age: Achieving high-precision geochronology.” Congratulations, Dr. Tsukui!
The Biology and Paleo Environment Division has welcomed the arrival of new Postdoctoral Research Scientist Tammo Reichgelt. A paleoecologist with a strong background in geology and biogeography, Tammo completed his Ph.D. last year with a thesis on the Early Miocene paleoecology of New Zealand, conducted under the supervision of Daphne Lee at the University of Otago. At Lamont, Tammo will work with Billy D’Andrea on the use of biomarkers to reconstruct Early Miocene paleoclimate and paleovegetation, as well as the reconstruction of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the Miocene from measurements of fossil leaves.
Lamont’s educational activities have ramped up this semester, in no small part because of the efforts of Cassie Xu, our Education and Outreach Coordinator. Cassie writes, “Since January we’ve had elementary, middle, and high school students from the Talented and Gifted Young Scholars School in East Harlem, the Ability School of Englewood, the French American School of Mamaroneck, and the Boy Scouts of Troop 13 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We also had the pleasure of welcoming graduate students from the ECO Student Alliance at the School of International and Public Affairs. These visits could not be made possible without the support and time of many researchers, administrative staff, postdoctoral research fellows, and graduate students, including John Allen (IRI), Weston Anderson, Nichole Anest, Ale Borunda, Steven Boswell, Kara Dennis, Nigel D’souza, Kelsey Dyez, Chia-Ying Lee (IRI), Bob Newton, Mike Passow, Frankie Pavia, David Porter, Hannah Rabinowitz, Jason Smerdon, and Margie Turrin. From now until June we will host additional groups from the Grant Avenue Elementary School in the Bronx, the Brooklyn College Geology Society, the Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics in East Harlem, and the Primoris Academy in Westwood.” For those of you interested in participating in one or more of these outreach opportunities, please contact Cassie (cassie@ei.columbia.edu).
Lamont’s Strategic Plan was posted this week on our website (https://lamont-doherty.atavist.com/strategicplan). On the basis of broad community input, a Strategic Planning Committee chaired by Robin Bell and Maureen Raymo developed the architecture of the plan and completed the writing last year. Committee members included Bob Anderson, Conny Class, Tim Crone, Jim Gaherty, Andy Juhl, Neil Pederson, Heather Savage, Richard Seager, Tiffany Shaw, and Donna Shillington. Rebecca Fowler then assisted with editing, added graphics, and designed the layout of the web version. This plan continues to guide our recruitment efforts, and with the assistance of our Advisory Board and our development team, we will be working next on the details of an implementation plan to guide our progress toward achieving the scientific strategy laid out by the committee.
On Tuesday morning, Columbia University's Executive Vice President for Finance, Anne Sullivan, visited Lamont to discuss how the new federal Uniform Guidance rules are affecting Principal Investigator oversight, compliance, and reporting for grants and other awards from federal science agencies. She was joined by a team from her office and the office of the Executive Vice President for Research, including Tamara Hamdan, Executive Director of Sponsored Projects, Finance; Katherine Sheeran, Executive Director of Human Resources, Finance; Brendan Mailee, Chief of Staff, Finance; Joseph Harney, Vice President for Procurement Services; Rudi Odeh-Ramadan, Associate Vice President, Office of Research Administration; Stephanie Scott, Director of Communications and Outreach, Sponsored Projects Administration; Joel Roselin, Assistant Director for Research Compliance and Training; and Jerald Boak, Associate Director for Training and Communications, Finance. Reviews by PIs of spending under their federal awards during the third quarter of this academic year will be the most imminent milestone under the new regulations.
On Tuesday evening, Adam Sobel was one of two marquee participants in an event on “Extreme weather past and future” staged by Columbia’s Office of Alumni and Development, as part of a three-part series aimed at local alumni and potential donors entitled “Deciding Factors: Climate Change.” Others from Lamont who joined me at the event, held at Columbia’s Startup Lab at WeWork Soho West, included Karen Buck, Peter deMenocal, Art Lerner-Lam, and Pete Sobel.
Yesterday I was at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., for what the agency called a media and public event to the celebrate the MESSENGER mission, beginning its final two weeks of orbital operations at Mercury. I was joined by Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division; Helene Winters, MESSENGER’s Project Manager, from the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL); and Dan O’Shaughnessy, MESSENGER’s Mission Systems Engineer, also from APL. With animations and video, we described the top ten scientific discoveries and the top ten technical achievements of the mission. Incidentally, spring is much more in evidence in Washington this week than at Lamont.
Lamont’s work on droughts in the western U.S. continued to be featured in the news this week. A Henry Fountain story in the Science section of The New York Times on Tuesday (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-history-of-drought...) on wet and dry periods in California’s history included comments by Richard Seager. Richard appeared Wednesday on a Diane Rehm Show episode on National Public Radio devoted to the topic (http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-04-15/what-ancient-weather-patter...).
Richard also authored an article about Mark Cane in last month’s issue of Oceanography (http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/28-1_seager.pdf). The article was written on the occasion of Mark’s election last year as a Fellow of The Oceanography Society.
Lamont’s Campus Life Committee will be sponsoring several events next week to celebrate Earth Day next Thursday (http://www.earthday.org/). Office Spring Cleaning and Recycling will be a focus for the entire workweek. On Tuesday, there will be a Yoga for Charity class. On Friday, two Bike-to-Work events will be staged, one from Manhattan and one from Nyack and Piermont; free breakfasts will be served to all bikers at the Lamont Café.
Friday of next week is also the deadline for submitting proposals to the Earth Institute’s Cross-Cutting Initiative (http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/61) and Earth Clinic (http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1790) seed-funding programs.
In the meantime, Lamont’s annual Diversity Lecture will be given today by Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia University’s Executive Vice President for University Life, Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law, and Director of the Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law (http://www.law.columbia.edu/magazine/60105/suzanne-b-goldberg). Suzanne’s lecture, to be given in the Monell Auditorium but at 2 pm rather in the usual Colloquium time slot, will be on “Diversity, inclusion and university life.” I hope that you will be included in the diverse university audience.
Sean