Endowed Faculty Chair in Climate Science

The Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Wyoming seeks a distinguished scientist for the Wyoming Excellence Chair in Climate Science, funded through the Excellence in Higher Education endowment of the State of Wyoming. In addition to an having an earned Ph.D. in atmospheric science or a closely related field, the successful candidate will have demonstrated a high level of accomplishment and leadership in his/her area of specialization, and will be eligible for a faculty appointment in the Department of Atmospheric Science at the rank of full professor, or associate professor for a person with compelling evidence of potential for rapid advancement. Scientists without previous university experience but with a demonstrated commitment to, and potential for, effective teaching in a university setting are welcome to apply.

The complete position description and the application instructions can be found here.

The 2006 Wyoming Legislature established the Excellence in Higher Education Endowment, which included a $70 million endowment for the creation of senior faculty positions for highly distinguished scholars and educators at the University of Wyoming.The legislation creating the Excellence in Higher Education endowment states that the endowed positions must expand university instruction and research in disciplines related to economic and social challenges facing Wyoming. Four endowed faculty positions must, by law, be in the College of Education. The remaining endowed faculty will be in other areas of distinction as identified in the university academic plan, including business, arts and humanities, mathematics, cultural studies, economics, and law. For more information, visit here.

Nestled between two mountain ranges in southeastern Wyoming, UW offers varied academic and lifestyle opportunities including year-round cultural and recreational activities. Located in Laramie, a town of 30,000 with a unique blend of sophistication and western hospitality, UW draws over 13,000 students from all 50 states and more than 75 countries. Recognized as one of the best value colleges - ranking 5th in America's Best College Buys - UW offers 190 areas of study, a small student/faculty ratio, and renowned faculty, and is among the nation's top universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report and Forbes. As a nationally recognized research institution, UW's global impact begins at our very own doorstep with innovative undergraduate and graduate research opportunities. UW welcomes you to join a community of over 6,000 faculty and staff. Tradition, pride, leadership and excellence are just a few of the fundamental principles exercised at UW. A modest and warm community, offering the resources of a large university, UW provides an environment for success! A recently posted YouTube video about Laramie is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g48PeRSjBuY.

For more information about Laramie and UW, visit here and here.

This department, one of six in the UW College of Engineering and Applied Science, concentrates principally on research and graduate education. We have 9 faculty members, 20 graduate students, and a staff which is relatively large compared to other departments at UW. The origins of the department can be traced to the college's Natural Resources Research Institute in the 1960s, and its transformation to the Department of Atmospheric Science in the early 1970s. We evolved around faculty interest in observations, developing facilities which now include the King Air research aircraft, the Stratospheric Balloon Facility, the Keck Aerosol Laboratory, Elk Mountain Observatory, and most our most recent addition, the Mobile Air Quality Laboratory. Our King Air has been funded as a national facility under a cooperative agreement between UW and NSF since 1988, and our cloud radar was added in 1999 and cloud lidar system in 2010 to that agreement. Since its origins, the department has broadened in its scientific scope with current strengths in cloud and aerosol physics, stratospheric aerosols and gases, boundary layer meteorology, and mesoscale cloud interactions. Our external funding level is about $3.5M/year, one of the largest on campus.

Recently, we have been also participating in a campus-wide undergraduate Earth System Science degree program as one of the degree concentrations. For more information about this, see http://www.uwyo.edu/ess/ .

The NCAR/Wyoming Supercomputer Center (NWSC) is a collaboration between the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Wyoming. The deployment of the future HPC environment at the NWSC will bring greatly expanded resources and opportunities for Wyoming researchers and their collaborators in atmospheric sciences, geosciences and Earth system sciences. About 75 million core-hour per year will be reserved for Wyoming researchers and their collaborators and allocated by a new University of Wyoming-managed process. Further details about NWSC is available at http://www.uwyo.edu/nwsc/ .

High Performance Computing (HPC) Update – UW Joins Top U.S. Computing Facilities

Starting this fall, the University of Wyoming research community will have access to one of the world's biggest and fastest supercomputers. The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a peta-scale, supercomputing center designed to maximize data-intensive science, and Wyoming has played a critical role in its creation.

The NWCS will initially have approximately 75,000 compute nodes performing 1.6 Peta-FLoating Operations Per Second (PFLOPS) and store 12 Petabytes of data (Peta = 1(10)15, 12 Petabytes = 187,500 64GB iPods). The data center facility, located just outside of Cheyenne, is completed, support staff is moving in, and the hardware has been ordered. The University is connected to the NWSC with a 10 Gigabit/sec network connection that is poised to upgrade quickly as the researchers demand it. According to the existing schedule, the University will begin to use the NWSC in August 2012.

Access to the NWSC will be granted to qualified researchers. A seminar to discuss the application process and logistics for using the facility was held February 24th.

In addition to the NWSC, the University is also building a substantial, local HPC resource. This world-class facility will comprise thousands of computing nodes, large-scale storage and seamless access through fast networking. This supercomputer will be available to UW researchers, faculty and students. The combination of the NWSC and the UW Supercomputer places the UW among the country's top research computing facilities. The facility will be in place and operational by the end of summer.

For more information regarding the NWSC or Research Computing at UW contact Tim Kuhfuss at (307) 766-4864 or tkuhfuss@uwyo.edu.

The University of Wyoming has been invited to be a member in the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC). The affiliation will enable UW to form research partnerships with other universities, pursue federal research funding and even potentially be tapped as a computational sciences resource expert by President Obama and/or Congress.

The university was invited in early January to join because of its strong core of programs in the computational sciences (areas include biology, engineering, geology and math) and its partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Wyoming Supercomputing Center, located in Cheyenne. For more information, see http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2012/02/uw-receives-computational-sciences-designation.html.