Lamont Weekly Report, January 16, 2015

 

     Karen Buck joined our office of Strategic Initiatives, Development and External Relations last week as Major Gifts Officer. Karen brings two decades of experience as a senior development professional in higher education. She has worked at the City University of New York Graduate Center, New York University, and The New School, among other institutions. At Lamont, Karen’s focus will be on individual donors, and she will assist with other areas of fundraising as well.

 

    Ethan Peck joined the Ocean and Climate Physics Division late last month as a Frontiers of Science Postdoctoral Fellow. Ethan completed his Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences last fall at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At Lamont he will be working with Lorenzo Polvani on coupling between the stratosphere and the troposphere.

 

     Two additions to the ranks of Postdoctoral Research Scientists in OCP are Jian Zhao and Louis Clément. Jian holds a 2014 Ph.D. from the University of Miami, and Louis obtained his Ph.D. last year from Southampton University. Both will work with Andreas Thurnherr on aspects of the dynamics of the upwelling limbs of the global overturning circulation of the ocean with the aim of determining the relative importance of the energy sources that drive turbulence and upwelling.

 

    The Seismology, Geology and Tectonophysics Division welcomed the arrival late last week of Lucia Gualtieri, who holds a recent Ph.D. from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. Lucia’s research focuses on the interaction between ocean dynamics and the solid Earth, observed through the seismic wave field. At Lamont she will be working with Göran Ekström, Meredith Nettles, and Spahr Webb. As if to balance the scales, SGT bid farewell at nearly the same time to Nicholas van der Elst, who left his postdoctoral position at Lamont to take a Mendenhall Fellowship at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, California.

 

    The Geochemistry Division this week welcomed Sandra Snaebjörnsdóttir, a graduate student at the University of Iceland who will be visiting Lamont until mid-March. Sandra is working on the subsurface storage of carbon dioxide through in situ mineral carbonation. Her host at Lamont is Martin Stute.

 

    At the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society last week in Phoenix, Sophia Brumer was awarded 2^nd prize for the best oral presentation at the 19^th Conference on Air-Sea Interaction, held concurrently with the AMS meeting. Sophia’s talk, on “Wave breaking and sea state dependence of gas transfer velocities,” included first results from observations collected in late 2013 during the High Wind Gas exchange Study (WiWinGS) cruise of the R/V Knorr south of Greenland. Congratulations, Sophia!

 

    On Monday, Art Lerner-Lam and I attended a meeting organized by Steve Cohen, Alison Miller, and Earth Institute Management Board chair Bill Eimicke to discuss the future of the Lamont Campus. The meeting included EI Management Board members David Emil and Steve Aiello, along with architect Carlie Hanson, a colleague of Aiello. The goal of the meeting was to take advantage of the expertise of Emil and Aiello in real estate development and public-private educational partnerships to brainstorm about opportunities for new facilities and infrastructure on our campus.

 

   On Monday evening, I attended a dinner salon hosted by Lamont Advisory Board member Wendy David on behalf of the Observatory’s Climate and Life initiative. Other participants from Lamont included Peter deMenocal, Richard Seager, Adam Sobel, and Advisory Board chair Sarah Johnson. This was the third such dinner event that Wendy and her husband George organized for Climate and Life.

 

    On Wednesday, Steve Cohen and I met with Columbia University Provost John Coatsworth and Vice Provost Troy Eggers to discuss financial models for support of operations and completion of needed repairs and upgrades to the infrastructure on the Lamont Campus. The meeting was one in a series preparatory to the development of the Lamont and EI budgets for the coming fiscal year.

 

   At a Council of Deans meeting on Thursday morning, John Coatsworth reminded those in attendance that proposals to the President’s Global Innovation Fund are due by 10 February (http://provost.columbia.edu/node/181). Also on the horizon is a proposal to Google, to be led by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to support a set of cross-school projects that address the causes and consequences of dislocation and displacement of large population groups. If this concept proceeds as now envisioned and funds are awarded, there will be opportunities for Lamont scientists to partner with colleagues in other Columbia University units and one or more New York City or non-governmental organizations to propose specific studies that fit within project guidelines. I’ll circulate additional information as I learn of it.

 

    Also on Thursday, Lamont was visited by Joel Widder and Meg Thompson, principals in Federal Science Partners and lobbyists for Columbia University. One of the purposes of their visit was to go over plans for a Lamont-IRI briefing on Capitol Hill next week on the topic of improving subseasonal to interannual forecasts of weather and climate variability. Sponsored by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the briefing will feature presentations by Lisa Goddard, Richard Seager, and Adam Sobel. Joel and Meg also met with the leadership and several senior scientists from Lamont, IRI, and CIESIN to discuss budgetary prospects for federal science agencies and mechanisms by which our scientists can provide input to the budget preparation process at the agencies and in Congress. 

 

   Also on Thursday, the newly all-electronic Eos, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, included an article coauthored by Kerstin Lehnert (https://eos.org/agu-news/committing-publishing-data-earth-space-sciences) on a statement of commitment (http://www.copdess.org/statement-of-commitment/) regarding policies and protocols for the publication and stewardship of scientific data. The statement was jointly issued by a new partnership of publishers and data repositories in the Earth and space sciences.

 

     Today’s issue of Science includes an article by Heather Ford, Pratigya Polissar, and Lamont alumna Christina Ravelo on a study of climate variability in the equatorial Pacific during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) about 20,000 years ago, when many aspects of the global climate differed from those today. On the basis of paleotemperatures inferred from chemical measurements of individual foraminifera shells, Heather and her colleagues concluded that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation displayed less variability during the LGM than in the modern era, the result of a deep thermocline in the eastern equatorial Pacific.

 

    Next week will mark the beginning of the spring season of the Earth Science Colloquium. The inaugural colloquium will be given by Kelly Wrighton, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology at The Ohio State University (http://microbiology.osu.edu/faculty/wrighton-kelly).

 

     This afternoon in the colloquium time slot, in Monell Auditorium, we will hold our annual Awards Recognition Ceremony to acknowledge all of our colleagues who received research and education awards between October 2013 and December 2014. Those who will be recognized include the following:

  

 

 

    A reception will follow the ceremony, and I hope to see you at both.

 

             Sean