Dear Alumni and Friends,
Welcome—or welcome back!—to the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Although a couple of faculty have retired in the past few years, we remain very active in the areas to which our longstanding BA, MA and PhD programs have always been committed. The department continues to welcome the best and brightest scholars from across the country and all over the world. We have 17 ladder faculty (including joint appointments) as well as three Distinguished Research Faculty/Emeriti. Additionally, we have seven adjunct faculty, one lecturer, 23 researchers, three project scientists, 15 postdoctoral scholars, and an incoming graduate student cohort of 10 this academic year. This year, several faculty have garnered special awards worth noting. Rob Fovell has been elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded the 2012 American Meteorological Society (AMS) Teaching Excellence Award. Michael Ghil was awarded the 2012 Alfred Wegener Medal and given honorary membership in the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Kuo-Nan Liou is the recipient of the 2012 Quadrennial Gold Medal Award given by the International Radiation Commission (IRC). I felt honored in being named Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Affiliated Researcher Yuri Shprits (Earth & Space Sciences) was a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award. Postdoctoral Scholar Lunjin Chen was chosen as recipient of the 2012 AGU Fred Scarf Award, established to recognize an outstanding dissertation that contributes directly to the solar-planetary science. Our graduate student awards include prestigious NASA Fellowships. Our graduate alumni are serving as project leaders with the NASA DEVELOP National Program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and are working with the California Department of Fish and Game and the National Weather Service. Our recent undergraduates have headed off to start their careers in prestigious graduate programs like Princeton, and into private industry with local groups such as SWAPE (“Soil/Water/Air Protection Enterprise”) in Santa Monica. Our department website and Facebook page provide more highlights.
We look forward to staying in touch with you, our friends and alumni, who have spent time with us or who wish to do so in the future. We hope you will participate in the life of the department. We would be delighted to see you at any of the lectures or symposia that we organize several times a year.
Your participation and support of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA means very much to us, especially in these difficult times for public education. Thank you for your continuing interest in ATMOS. We look forward to hearing from you or seeing you at one of our future events.