Biographical Sketch of Alan Robock

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970 with a B.A. in Meteorology. For the next 2 years I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, developing curricula and training teachers of meteorology in the fishery vocational schools. I then attended graduate school in the Department of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving an S.M. in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1977. From then until the end of 1997, I was on the faculty of the Department of Meteorology of the University of Maryland, where I was a Professor and the State Climatologist of Maryland (1991-1997). I moved to Rutgers University in January, 1998, where I am a Professor II in the Department of Environmental Sciences. I am the Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Prediction. I am the Director of the Meteorology Undergraduate Program and a member of the Graduate Program in Atmospheric Science at Rutgers. I was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1998. I was listed in Who's Who in America in 1999. In 2007 I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as one of the 2,500 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

My research involves many aspects of climate change. I conduct both observational analyses and climate model simulations. My current research focuses on geoengineering, regional atmosphere-hydrology modeling, climatic effects of nuclear weapons, soil moisture variations, the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate, detection and attribution of human effects on the climate system, and the impacts of climate change on human activities. I have published more than 250 articles on my research, including more than 150 peer-reviewed papers.

I served as Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres from April 2000 through March 2005 and of the Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology from January 1985 through December 1987. I was Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres from November 1998 to April 2000 and of Reviews of Geophysics from September 1994 to December 2000, and am once again serving as Associate Editor of Reviews of Geophysics, since February, 2006.

I am a member of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and International Association of Volcanism and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI). I am President-Elect of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of AGU. I was a snow forecaster for Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools for the winter of 1980-81. I was awarded a AAAS Congressional Science Fellowship in 1986, and served as Legislative Assistant to Congressman Bill Green (NY) and Research Fellow with the Environmental and Energy Study Conference from September, 1986, through August, 1987. During the 1994-95 academic year I was on sabbatical as a Visiting Research Scientist in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University, conducting climate research at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. My most recent sabbatical, 2004-05, was spent in Antarctica and at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Paris, France. I have been the Member Representative for Rutgers University to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) since 2001, and serve on its President's Advisory Committee on University Relations. I was an active participant in the US-USSR Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection, visiting the Soviet Union as an Exchange Scientist 6 times from 1979 through 1985, and once more in 2004.

My favorite music is rock and folk, especially the music of

Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, and Christine Lavin.

Prepared by Alan Robock (robock@envsci.rutgers.edu) - Last updated on January 31, 2008