A massive moment for Emily Luschen’s career: she is now the recipient of a prestigious NSF GRFP fellowship! Her research proposal focused on understanding how cloud–radiation feedback affects and accelerates the formation of tropical cyclones, which she will also investigate in relation to climate change during her PhD research. Congrats to Emily!!

Our sophomore Andrew Muehr also received a major nod for a major career milestone: his first lead-authored manuscript, which is on the role and influence of midlevel shear on supercells. While impressive on its own for his career stage, this manuscript earned him the Mark & Kandi McCasland Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research Paper from the SoM. Congrats to Andrew!! This paper is now out for peer-review, so stay tuned.

A double-congrats to our new addition: junior Robby Frost. Robby was just awarded the Edwin and Lottie Kessler Memorial Endowed Scholarship in Meteorology from the SoM for outstanding work as an undergraduate researcher. Robby was also awarded a NOAA Lapenta internship to spend this summer working at the Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, CO. Robby is living a double-researcher life, one on tropical cyclones with our group and another on boundary layer dynamics with Prof. Scott Salesky’s group. Congrats to Robby!!

Major congrats to our other new addition, junior Colin Welty, who just found out he received an OU Provost’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (UReCA) Fellowship. This award funds Colin to spend his summer on a research topic that he proposed, which will look at the role of the diurnal cycle in the overland intensification of Tropical Storm Erin, which intensified over Oklahoma in 2007. A remarkable case to study and a fantastic award. Congrats to Colin!!