How is CIRES organized to accomplish its work?

CIRES is governed by a Council of Fellows, which serves as the institute's board of directors, sets overall policy and directions for CIRES, and recommends to the University and NOAA the appointment of the CIRES Director. The Director reports to both the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Associate Administrator of OAR/NOAA. The Council of Fellows is comprised of individuals with an outstanding record of achievement and ability in diverse areas of environmental sciences. They are primarily university faculty, senior research scientists or government scientists who form the core leadership of the institute. Their responsibilities are to: provide leadership at all levels in environmental science; maintain an active scientific research/education program; support the CIRES infrastructure through indirect cost recovery and in-kind contributions; participate in CIRES management, and contribute interdisciplinary expertise and participate in collaborative work. As a group, they personify the concept of collaboration that is the founding principle of the NOAA Cooperative Institutes program (see What is a Cooperative Institute?). Ex-officio members of the council include representatives of the Members' Council and CIRES administration.

The CIRES Members' Council, created by CIRES in 1997, represents the non-Fellow career track employees of CIRES and provides input to the Council of Fellows and the Director. The Council serves as a policy and advisory body, which provides representation to CIRES employees within the Institute's governance structure.

The CIRES Executive Committee works with and advises the Director on a variety of issues including preliminary work on planning and policies to be brought before the Council of Fellows. The Committee also assists and advises the Director in matters regarding day-to-day management of CIRES.

CIRES is organized into divisions that reflect the disciplines: Atmosphere and Climate Dynamics; Environmental Chemistry and Biology; Cryosphere and Polar Processes; and Solid Earth Sciences. This management structure is suited for handling personnel activities including annual evaluation and promotion. Each CIRES employee is identified with a particular division. In the current cooperative agreement, six new scientific theme areas help to organize the interdisciplinary science activities. Science funding is more aligned with these theme areas. CIRES employees are likely to be involved in more than one scientific theme. Hence, the organization of people is more appropriately described as a matrix linking divisions and science themes. Finally, CIRES has five research centers that represent historical and current thrusts within the themes that have a major critical mass of research activities. In many cases the research centers are a consequence of block funding from a particular agency for a particular activity, as for example the National Snow and Ice Data Center. In other cases, the centers are a means of providing an identity to a major focus of work within the Institute, i.e. the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, the Climate Diagnostics Center, and the Center for the Study of Earth from Space and the Center for Limnology.

Additional CIRES committees help to perform the work of the Institute and include the Visiting Fellows Committee, Fellows Appointment Committee, Career Track Committee, Space Committee, Awards Committee, Computing Advisory Committee, Distinguished Lectureship Series, and various faculty search committees.