[Grad-postdoc-assn] 2007 Thompson Lecture Series Nominees

[Kristen Corbosiero]

Hello all-

On behalf of the Thompson Lecture Series committee, I would like to 
thank everyone who participated in the December 7th discussion of the 
series.  For those of you who were unable to attend, we had a great 
discussion and many suggestions were made on how to improve both the 
nomination and voting processes, and the structure of the Thompson visit 
itself.   During the course of the discussion, we decided we would 
implement some of these suggestions in a new round of nominations and 
voting for the 2007 Thompson Lecturers.  As this will be the first 
nomination and voting round for many post docs, we encourage you to 
visit the Thompson Lecture Series web site at 
http://www.asp.ucar.edu/thompson/thompson_lecture.jsp to read about the 
history of the series and view a list of our previous esteemed lecturers.

We're enacting two major changes to the nomination process this time 
around: 1) we are requiring that you not only submit a name for 
consideration, but a short statement about the nominee and why you think 
they should be a Thompson Lecturer, and 2) we are going high tech and 
using the UCAR swiki system to manage the nominations and discussion. 

The nomination statement is meant to be short, not more than 4-5 
sentences, detailing the nominee's research interests, current and past 
positions, outstanding accomplishments to the field and any personal 
insight you may have into the nominee that makes them an exceptional 
candidate.  You are also encouraged to provide a link to your nominee's 
web site.  As an example of what we are looking for, here is a statement 
about our last Thompson Lecturer, Dr. Bob Houze:

Dr. Robert Houze has been a professor of atmospheric science at the 
University of Washington for nearly 35 years.  His research interests 
lie in the fields of mesoscale, radar and tropical meteorology, 
precipitation processes, cloud dynamics and microphysics, and storm 
dynamics.  Dr. Houze has written over 200 scientific articles and is the 
author of the graduate text book "Cloud Dynamics".  He was elected a 
fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1984 and has received 
numerous awards from the society including its highest honor, the 
Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Award, in 2006.   Dr. Houze has participated 
in numerous international field campaigns and is a leading expert in 
utilizing observations from field campaigns to improve our understanding 
of the atmosphere.  More information can be found about Dr. Houze at 
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/%7Ehouze/.

The new nomination process is designed to encourage all post docs, 
regardless of division or field, to take an active role in selecting the 
Thompson Lecturer and participating in their visits.  It is our hope 
that by requiring more information about the scientists being nominated, 
that all post docs will carefully consider potential nominees in all 
fields and learn something about the distinguished members of the 
science community being nominated.
     
We are asking you to post your nomination statements directly to the 
Thompson Lecture Series swiki at http://swiki.ucar.edu/thompson-lecture 
(you will need your UCAS username & password to log in) by January 
12th.  Not to worry if you don't consider yourself to be "tech 
savvy"...the swiki system is extremely easy to use (all the user 
information you need is contained in the links to the left after you log 
in).  By using this system, everyone can see the nominations throughout 
the process and comment on the nominees.  We are hoping this will be a 
great forum for discussion and feedback. 

After the nomination period is over, we  plan to have social sometime 
during the week of January 22nd to discuss the nominees in an informal 
setting and narrow the field down to 4-5 nominees for voting.  It is our 
goal to have the next Thompson Lecturer selected by the end of January 
so that we may have she or he visit NCAR sometime in the spring.

We thank you again for your participation in the discussion and look 
forward to seeing your nominations posted to the swiki over the next few 
weeks!

Kristen, Tom, Gyuwon and Ankur

-- 
Kristen L. Corbosiero
ASP / MMM
National Center for Atmospheric Research
P.O. BOX 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000

Office: FL3 Rm.2068
e-mail: corbosie at ucar.edu
phone:  (303) 497-8185
web: http://www.atmos.albany.edu/student/kristen/index.html