Jay Pasachoff: A Solar Eclipse of a Former Mathematician’s Heart

Dr. Pasachoff explains his journey from being the shortest math major in Harvard history to a 50+ illustrious career in solar astronomy. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

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Jay Pasachoff, Chair of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Eclipses, is Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams College and a Visitor in Planetary Science at Caltech. He has viewed 60 solar eclipses, and is an expert on both their use for scientific observations and their use for public education. Pasachoff is past president of the International Astronomical Union’s Commission on Education and Development and Chair of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society. He received the Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society and, last year, the Janssen Prize of the Société Astronomique de France. Pasachoff is the author or co-author of The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, the Peterson Field Guide to the Stars and Planets, and Nearest Star: The Surprising Science of Our Sun as well as, on a more technical level, The Solar Corona.

 

 

Jeffrey Shaman: The Game Changer

Prof. Jeffrey Shaman thinks he has discovered something big…but no one will look at his paper. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

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Jeffrey Shaman is an infectious disease modeler at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. His background is in climate, atmospheric science and hydrology, as well as biology. He studies the environmental determinants of infectious disease transmission, in particular, how atmospheric conditions impact the survival, transmission and seasonality of pathogens and how hydrologic variability affects mosquito ecology and mosquito-borne disease transmission. More broadly he is interested in how meteorology affects human health. Much of his work is computational, employing combined model-inference systems to forecast infectious disease outbreaks at a range of time scales. Shaman also studies a number of climate phenomena, including Rossby wave dynamics, atmospheric jet waveguides, the coupled South Asian monsoon-ENSO system, extratropical precipitation, and tropical cyclogenesis.