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| Dr.
Kelvin K. Droegemeier |
Director
Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, Norman, OK
Professor of Meteorology
School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma
Kelvin Droegemeier earned a B.S.
with Special Distinction in Meteorology in 1980 from the University of Oklahoma,
and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in atmospheric science in 1982 and 1985, respectively,
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He joined the University
of Oklahoma in September, 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Meteorology, and
was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in July, 1991 and to Professor
in July, 1998. He was named a Presidential Professor in 1998, and was co-founder
in 1989 of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Analysis and Prediction
of Storms (CAPS) and became its director in 1994. In 1998, Dr. Droegemeier was
named a Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma, and in summer 1999
began writing a daily weather science column for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper,
which is Oklahoma's largest with a circulation of well over one million.
In 1992,
Droegemeier spent a 6-month sabbatical as a senior research fellow at the Army
High Performance Computing Center, University of Minnesota. As director of the
CAPS model development project for 5 years, he managed the creation of a multi-scale
numerical prediction system that is envisioned as national prototype for operational
implementation early in the next century. This computer model was a finalist
for the 1993 National Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing. In 1997,
Droegemeier received the Discover Magazine Award for Technology Innovation (computer
software category), and also in 1997 CAPS was awarded the Computerworld Smithsonian
Award (science category). Dr. Droegemeier helped create in 1999 Weather Decision
Technologies, a private corporation that is commercializing advanced weather
technology developed by the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Droegemeier's research
interests lie in thunderstorm dynamics and predictability, variational data assimilation,
mesoscale dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, massively parallel computing,
and aviation weather. In 1987, he was named a Presidential Young Investigator
by the National Science Foundation, and has served as an associate editor for
Monthly Weather Review. He is presently chair of the UCAR University Relations
Committee. Droegemeier has consulted for the Air Transport Systems Division of
Honeywell Corporation, American Airlines, the National Transportation Safety
Board, and Climatological Consulting Corp.
In his 15 years at the University of
Oklahoma, Dr. Droegemeier has received numerous awards and has generated over
$18 million in external research funding. For over a decade, he has been among
the top 5 faculty at the University of Oklahoma in external research grant funding,
averaging over $1.5 million per year. Dr. Droegemeier has been an invited speaker
at or organizer of several international conferences and symposia on meteorology,
high-performance computing, and computational fluid dynamics in the U.S., England,
Japan, Australia, Korea, and France. He recently organized and chaired a national
symposium on the Great Plains Tornado Outbreak of 3 May 1999, which was the first
multi-disciplinary examination of a major tornado disaster. Dr. Droegemeier has
authored and co-authored 46 refereed journal articles and over 150 conference
publications. He is a former Vice President of the Central Oklahoma Chapters
of the American Meteorological Society and National Weather Association.
Droegemeier's
days are as varied as Oklahoma's weather. On a single one of these days, he says
that he "advised 6 undergraduates on course selection
for the next term, prepared a talk for a national meeting, met with 2 graduate
students, dealt with a computer disk crash, answered 50 email messages, attended
an OU budget council meeting, talked on the phone to collaborators at American
Airlines, worked on a progress report of a federal research grant, wrote and
submitted an abstract to a professional conference, worked with my secretary
to set up travel arrangements for 2 meetings, wrote a memo to change a student's
course enrollment, wrote a response letter to a scientist inquiring about employment
at CAPS, prepared lecture notes for the next day, returned a phone call from
the Dean, and wrote and submitted a letter of intent for a major research proposal."
Kelvin's
hobbies and interests include playing the drums, music ministry, youth ministry,
American history from World War II through the 1960's, and riding motorcycles.
He and his wife, Lisa, also enjoy playing with their dog, Binky. |
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