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Kenneth Jucks, Program Manager for the Upper Atmosphere Research Program at NASA Headquarters, has gone from launching weather balloons, what he calls a “poor man’s satellite” to take measurements up to 25 miles above the Earth’s surface, to managing five...

James Butler has studied atmospheric chemistry, ozone depletion for over thirty years. Now, as the Director of NOAA’s global monitoring, he helps direct research into the hole in the ozone layer and climate change. He knows firsthand that we have...

The next time you see a young kid skateboarding through the neighborhood, possibly listening to punk rock on their earbuds, remember that one day that kid could be your local science professor. Doug Jerolmack’s sturdy voice and love of experimenting...

Catherine McCammon, staff scientist at Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth, Germany and longtime AGU volunteer discusses collaboration and explains how she has found that the “the whole is great than the sum of its parts,” is truly an accurate statement....

Denis-Didier Rousseau, Senior Research Scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Fall Meeting Program Committee Chair shares how at six years old he set the goal to be a paleontologist. He discusses how that has shaped his life...

Richard Johnson is an AGU member who has been coming to Fall Meeting for years. He discusses some of the keynotes he’s attended in recent years, like those by Jerry Brown, Elon Musk, and Dan Rather. A sci-fi enthusiast, Richard...

The start of a fruitful career for Richard Eckman was being on a team which discovered that the stratosphere and ozone varied in relation to the sun’s 27-day rotation. Eckman, who now works with NASA’s Atmospheric Composition Modeling and Analysis...

Michael Freilich, Director of NASA's Earth Science Division, shares about his life studying the oceans and Earth as a system. While still in his high school's oceanography club, he started exploring a question about how waves move that later became...

Miguel Román, a Physical researcher Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, shares his journey from his childhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico to NASA. Seeing the impacts of hurricanes and urban growth where he grew up, and the practical...

Scott Tyler, hydrology engineer at the University of Nevada Reno and AGU Hydrology section president, shares his work on Antarctic ice shelves, nuclear waste, and stream restoration. Do we need to build sea walls in ten years or in one...

Louise Prockter knows a thing or two about logistics and planning. When the first image of the unseen hemisphere of Mercury popped onto the screen during a flyby mission, her first thought was, "oh thank God, it's in the middle...

After one spends 50 years with the same organization, what’s next? That’s the question Dave Mao is attempting to answer after a highly-decorated career at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Born in Shangai and raised in Taiwan, Mao came to...

Emily Wolin is almost singe-handedly trying to upgrade Myanmar’s national seismic network. As a student, Emily saw the Mount Saint Helens eruption. Today, she helps scientists in Myanmar prepare their country for the aftermath of the next hurricanes to come...

The potential downside of a career in always seeking discoveries is that it may stunt the development of your confidence. Even as someone who walked into NASA, living the dream in his mind, Nathan Kurtz experiences that downside, politely calling...

Sprites are electrical discharges like lightning, but up in the middle atmosphere. Having only been in the scientific literature since the 1990s, sprites captured Geoff McHarg’s imagination while observing the Aurora in Alaska. Perfect for a guy whose view of...

Chris Atchison didn’t set out to create a project tailored for students with physical and sensory disabilities but ending up doing so anyway. He talks here about working on a virtual reality project and, when trying to find students who...

Seismologist Lucy Jones gained recognition for doing a TV interview following the 1992 Joshua Tree earthquake while holding her sleeping infant son. Long before that, she became one of the first American scientists to enter China after it’s normalization in...

Zachary Wolff talks about how his path to studying and creating models as a graduate student at UC Irvine was not straightforward: he first considered medicine and meteorology before working on a CICE radiation study and discovering his interest. While...

How did Biogeoscience become a recognized field of study, with its own journal and sections at AGU? What obstacles did its organizers have to overcome in order to make it a viable field and a welcome presence at AGU? In...

Erin Robinson is the Executive Director of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). She knew from early on that she was interested in science and her field of remote sensing, from good science teachers in middle and high school to...

It took 21 years for Trevor McDougall to leave Australia, but when he did, he was on a plane headed to the University of Cambridge and a masters and Ph.D. in Oceanography. Besides the life-changing event of going from one...

Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, a research scientist at the Space Science Institute, shares stories of her career in planetary science. She recounts how defining the launch of Voyager was and the significance of the growth in the field since. Padma shares her...

Ross Stein is CEO and Co-Founder of Temblor, Inc., Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, a scientist at the Unites States Geological Survey, creator of films about earthquake science, and president of the AGU’s tectonic physics section. In this interview, Margarete...

For Jim Pizzuto, a career in science was never the plan. His father was a landscape painter, and he grew up surrounded by art and the majestic landscape paintings that his father produced. By the time he entered college, he...

As a child, Luke Oman was always looking out the window. Today, he works on atmospheric processing for NASA. How do volcanic eruptions affect everyday life? What happens when sulfur dioxide gases from volcanoes interact with sulfate aerosol and stay...