Join us on Wednesday, June 26, at 4 pm UTC for the Funk Lecture given by Michael Douglas.
Talk title: “Promoting Biogeography Through Cruise Ship Lecturing”
Dr. Douglas is a retired NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) research meteorologist who worked for 22 years at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. His duties involved both basic research and supervising graduate students in his NOAA- funded research projects. His formal education involved an undergraduate degree in Geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and MS and PhD’s in Atmospheric Science and Meteorology from the University of Miami and Florida State University respectively. Most of his NOAA-related research focused on developing climate monitoring networks in developing countries and research into various aspects of tropical weather and climate, especially monsoonal circulations. He has a long interest in educational activities. During graduate school he taught Earth Science courses at a nearby Community College on the side and developed Earth Science-related slide sets (pre-internet era) that were sold to 40 universities. To work effectively with many meteorological services in Latin America he organized short, intensive courses of multi-week duration to provide fundamental background in tropical meteorology concepts and atmospheric observing techniques. In addition, he taught tropical meteorology material during two multi-month stints in Mexico City to diverse meteorological communities consisting of both university researchers and operational forecasters. He also helped to organize major multi-month meteorological field programs in both North and South America. He was active in meetings and document preparation during the formative period of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. Collectively, this international experience is relevant to the IBS community for two reasons. First, it allowed him to travel widely where he could explore natural history-related subjects he already had an interest in, and secondly, from interaction with the university community in Latin America, he developed a better awareness of the challenges that nature conservation activities face in Latin America.
Since taking early retirement from NOAA in 2013, Dr. Douglas has focused on expanding life-long interests in various natural history subjects, especially aspects of botany and zoology, and has presented material at four IBS meetings and published research in Frontiers in Biogeography related to using high-spatial resolution satellite-based cloud climatologies for biogeographical and conservation applications. He is a member of the American Meteorological Society and is a member of the IBS education committee. He and his wife maintain an educational website “The Naturalist’s Travel Page” for natural history travelers at https://thetravelingnaturalist.org/. A broad overview of environmental issues, intended for students, educators, and the public, is on a separate website (“A Norman Environmental Primer”).
