I lived in Philly until the ripe age of 18 months, whereup my family moved to Buffalo, NY. There we lived near our paternal grandparents and friends until 1970, when we moved to Phoenix, AZ. I grew up between Camelback and Mummy mountains in the purity of the desert.
The air was hot, dry and clean, for Phoenix had yet to experience its upcoming boom. Tumbleweeds blew across our street and duststorms blasted the landscape almost every summer evening. These were often followed by terrific lighting storms and rain. (Deep inhale) there's nothing like the desert after a rainstorm.
In 1980 I graduated high school and returned to upstate New York to pursue higher education and visit old friends and family. I attended the University of Rochester. It took three years, but I finally learned how to dress for the bitter cold (I even came to enjoy it, occassionally). My senior year, I decided a warmer climate was desirable. After graduating in 1984 with a B.S. in physics and a B.A. in Mathematics, I went to the University of Texas at Austin for a Ph.D. in physics. After the first year I was eager to escape abstract academic studies and develop skills in experimental physics.
In the summer of 1985 I was fortunate to be accepted as a student of
Dr. Harry Swinney (aka. "King
of Chaos") to work on a
laboratory simulation of the
Great Red Spot of
Jupiter. This turned out to be fantastically successful with lots of
publications, thanks to an
excellent postdoc named Dr. Joel Sommeria.
We received lots of popular attention, including video footage
(that I made) on NOVA and an award from Popular Science Magazine.
Descriptions of our work appeared in innumerable newspapers and magazines
such as
Astronomy Magazine. An additional experiment was performed on
eastward jets
that examined the formation of
mixing barriers in a quasi-geostrophic flow and relations to
the ozone hole.
Now I ask you, what do you do with your career
after all that? Right! Switch fields!
After receiving my Ph.D. in 1990, I went to Florida State University to learn oceanography from Dr. James J. O'Brien at what was then the Mesoscale Air-Sea Interaction Group, which later became the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies Soon I was promoted to (Co-)Associate Director, a postition I held for roughly five years.
After the successful transformation to an active oceanographer, it was time to establish myself independently. Thus, in early autumn of 1998, I began work at the Ocean Modeling and Prediction Laboratory in the Department of Marine Science.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories,
instead of theories to suit facts.
-Sherlock Holmes
A Scandal in Bohemia by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8/01/2005
