Biographical Sketch of Philippines RPCV Alan Robock
Biographical Sketch of Alan Robock
I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970 with a B.A. in Meteorology. For the next 2 years I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, developing curricula and training teachers of meteorology in the fishery vocational schools. I then attended graduate school in the Department of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving an S.M. in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1977. From then until the end of 1997, I was on the faculty of the Department of Meteorology of the University of Maryland, where I was a Professor and the State Climatologist of Maryland. I moved to Rutgers University in January, 1998, where I am a Professor II in the Department of Environmental Sciences. I am the Director of the Center for Environmental Prediction and Director of the Atmospheric Sciences Option of the Environmental Sciences Graduate Program at Rutgers. I was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1998. I was listed in Who's Who in America in 1999.
My research involves many aspects of climate change. I conduct both observational analyses and climate model simulations. My current research focuses on soil moisture variations, the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate, detection and attribution of human effects on the climate system, and the impacts of climate change on human activities. In the 1980s much of my work addressed the problem of nuclear winter, the climatic effects of nuclear war, demonstrating long-term (several year) effects with a computer model, disproving the dirty snow effect, and discovering observational evidence of surface cooling due to forest fire smoke plumes in the atmosphere. I have published more than 200 articles on my research, including more than 110 peer-reviewed papers.
I now serve as Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, from April 2000 through December 2004. I was Editor of the Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology from January 1985 through December 1987 and Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres from November 1998 to April 2000 and of Reviews of Geophysics from September 1994 to December 2000.
I am a member of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), International Association of Volcanism and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI), and Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I am the leader of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Science (IAMAS) and International Association of Volcanism and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) Joint Task Group on Volcanism and the Earth's Atmosphere (VEA). I am a member of the Land Data Assimilation System Science Team. I was awarded a AAAS Congressional Science Fellowship in 1986, and served as Legislative Assistant to Congressman Bill Green (NY) and Research Fellow with the Environmental and Energy Study Conference from September, 1986, through August, 1987. I was a snow forecaster for Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools for the winter of 1980-81. During the 1994-95 academic year I was on sabbatical as a Visiting Research Scientist in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University, conducting climate research at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. I was an active participant in the US-USSR Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection, visiting the Soviet Union as an Exchange Scientist 6 times since 1979.
My favorite music is rock and folk, especially the music of
Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, and Christine Lavin.
