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Posted: April 23, 2008

First ESRL-CIRES Scholar Announced

Ryan Neely has been selected as the first recipient of the ESRL-CIRES Graduate Research Fellowship. The four-year award, which includes full tuition, a stipend, and other benefits, will allow Neely to earn a Ph.D. at CU-Boulder and simultaneously conduct research with world-renowned scientists at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. The ESRL-CIRES fellowship is a new, competitive, educational award program designed to foster interdisciplinary research and academic excellence for exceptional, prospective, CIRES graduate students.

Neely, who is completing a B.A. in Physics at North Carolina State University this spring, will matriculate at CU’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department in August.

Although originally from North Carolina, Neely is no stranger to Boulder. In 2007, he interned at NOAA’s Boulder lab after winning the first “Taking the Pulse of the Planet” award (2005) for calculating the uptake of carbon dioxide by trees in a carbon-rich environment. As part of the internship, Neely worked with Russ Schnell, from NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division, and analyzed wintertime production of ozone in rural Wyoming. He also developed meteorological analysis software for NOAA’s baseline observatories and operated the division’s LIDAR – an instrument that measures atmospheric variables using pulses of laser light.

“I really found working with LIDAR to be fun and exciting. The possibilities of using LIDAR to nail down exactly how clouds work and to understand the energy exchange between clouds and atmosphere seems unlimited,” said Neely, who will be back in Boulder this summer on a NOAA Hollings Scholarship.

Neely plans to incorporate LIDAR development into his graduate research to study cloud processes and aerosols. He hopes to spend a season at the South Pole to learn more, in person, about the dynamics and chemistry of the atmosphere over the Antarctic.

Ryan Neely