Ousmane Ndiaye’s path to becoming the director of Senegal’s national meteorological service was an unlikely one: Born in Senegal as the youngest of 10 children, he lost his parents at a young age and was raised mostly by one of his sisters. That sister was deeply committed to her little brother’s education, and Ousmane ended…

To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation. Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020…

It’s been a while since we released the last episode of Deep Convection, but Season 3 is finally here! We are starting the season with a “prologue episode” featuring Adam and Melanie. Adam asks Melanie how her life has changed since their Deep Convection conversation that was recorded 2.5 years ago (and, spoiler alert, some…

When Shang-Ping Xie entered middle school in his home town about 300 miles southwest of Shanghai, China had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous political movement launched by Mao Zedong that had dominated Chinese life for a decade in the 1960s and 70s. That was lucky timing and a big turning point…

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, George Philander had to follow a lot of laws that didn’t make sense to him, e.g., that he was not allowed to stand in the line for white people at the post office. When he discovered mathematics and science, he was happy to have found a world that…

Suzana Camargo is one of the world’s leading experts on tropical cyclones — a type of storm that includes hurricanes — and their relationship to the climate. When she first started to do research on hurricanes, she thought it was only going to be a one-year project. But life is unpredictable, and so “[…] and…

Nadir Jeevanjee is one of those rare people who have both depth and breadth in their skills. He is probably the only person who ever wrote a textbook about tensors and group theory while taking a few years off from grad school to tour with a rock band, and that fact alone should make you…

Fran Moore, an assistant professor in Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, works at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. She studies the impacts of climate change from an economic and societal perspective — how to quantify these impacts, and also how people and communities adapt. Fran grew up in London, but…

Before Marshall Shepherd was bitten by the weather bug, he wanted to be an entomologist. But as luck would have it (at least for the fields of weather and climate science), Marshall changed his sixth-grade science project from honey bees to weather prediction after he had found out that he was highly allergic to bee stings….

On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the…