Honoring Our Own
About the Event
We will thank William "Bill" Ryan (M.S. '90, meteorology), who taught meteorology at Penn State for 23 years and received the 2025 UMD Alumni Excellence Legacy Award, for his generous support of AOSC graduate students. He established the Leah Thornton Lozano Graduate Fellowship, Wallace Patillo Reed Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, and George Huffman Graduate Teaching Assistantships. (Read more about William Ryan)
George Huffman, Ryan's first UMD mentor, is chief of the Mesoscale Atmospheric Processes Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He began his professional journey as an assistant professor of meteorology at UMD in 1982, and his research focuses on the design, implementation and extension of combined (satellite-gauge) estimates of global precipitation, leveraging data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and its successor, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, where he serves as project scientist. Huffman is the author of over 145 publications, a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the recipient of the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 2018. (Read more about George Huffman)
Ryan's support will also establish the Eugene Rasmusson Conference Room in the Atlantic Building, room 3425. Rasmusson (1929-2015) was a research scientist and professor in the department from 1986 to 2015. He served as president of the American Meteorological Society in 1998 and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1999. He is best known for seminal climate research on atmospheric and terrestrial water cycles and the ocean-atmosphere structure of El-Niño southern oscillation, and for shepherding climate research during his decades-long leadership of National Research Council committees. (Read more about Eugene Rasmusson)
We will also honor AOSC Professor Emerita Rachel Pinker (Ph.D. '76, meteorology) for her 50-plus-year career by naming room 3408 in the Atlantic Building the Rachel Pinker Computer Lab. Pinker, who joined the faculty in 1977 and retired in 2025, recognized early in her career that the changing patterns of climate are created by the interaction between the atmosphere and Earth’s surface. Her groundbreaking work using satellite observations to understand radiative fluxes at the Earth's surface greatly enhanced scientists' understanding of atmosphere-land and atmosphere-ocean interactions and contributed to many important climate research projects, including numerous collaborations with NASA and NOAA. (Read more about Rachel Pinker)