Dr. Mike Donahue (Panel Chair) is a Vice President with AECOM Technical Services, Inc., where he has led the company’s Global Coastal and Ecosystem Restoration Practice. He has over 40 years’ experience supporting the work of various local, state and federal agencies as well as private sector clients. Among others, he has served as Program Manager or Project Manager for multiple large contracts and task orders.  Dr. Donahue’ technical expertise and professional training focuses primarily on environmental planning, with a strong emphasis on program and institutional evaluation.  Toward that end, he has provided those services for numerous large programs and projects for various public and private sector clients. While his responsibilities have been global in nature, he has a particularly strong focus on US regions, principal among them the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast. Prior to joining AECOM, he served as President and CEO of the Great Lakes Commission, a binational agency specializing in water resources planning, policy, technical services, and project management for the Great Lakes states and provinces. Dr. Donahue has served (among others) as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board; Panel Chair of the NOAA review of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research;  Vice-chair of the Chief of Engineer’s Environmental Advisory Board; US Chair of the International Joint Commission’s Science Advisory Board, a member of the US Great Lakes Policy Committee; as a founding member of the Natural Infrastructure Initiative; and as a member of the ASCE Committee on Natural and Nature-based Infrastructure Systems. Dr. Donahue holds three degrees from The University of Michigan including a doctorate in Urban, Technological and Environmental Planning with a specialty in Environmental Planning. He has lectured extensively at universities throughout the US and Canada, and has held adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and the University of Toledo School of Law.  He has authored approximately 250 book chapters as well as peer-reviewed and general interest articles.

Dr. Belay Demoz holds a doctoral degree in Atmospheric Physics from the University of Nevada and Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. Dr. Demoz is Professor of Physics at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). At UMBC he Directed the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET: http://jcet.umbc.edu) and is currently the PI and Executive Director for the Goddard Earth Sciences technology and Research II (https://gestar2.umbc.edu/).  JCET and GESTAR II are cooperative centers formed between UMBC and NASA/GSFC that have cumulatively about 160FTE of staff, faculty and students. Prior to joining UMBC/JCET, Dr. Demoz was Professor of Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard University, where he was Director of Graduate Studies for the Physics Department and also one of the Principal PI’s at the Beltsville Research Campus where he still serves as lead of the GRUAN activity and Adjunct Professor of Atmospheric Science in collaboration with the NOAA NCASM center. Before joining academia, Dr. Demoz worked for the private industry as a NASA contractor, followed by time spent as a Civil Servant at NASA/GSFC in the Mesoscale Dynamics Branch. His research interests include mesoscale observation and instrumentation in atmospheric physics and climate as well as atmospheric science influence in climate policy. He has Chaired professional AMS committees (AMS – CLAS), organized and Chaired National and International Workshops and Symposium (AMS, and ILRC30) and is a member of Earth Science Advisory Committee (ESAC); the Scientific and Technical Working Group of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change; and many editorial boards.

Dr. Kim Klockow-McClain works as a UCAR/CPAESS Senior Social Scientist supporting NOAA/NWS/NCEP, and she serves as the NCEP Coordinator for Social Science Applications. In this role, Kim provides expert support within and across the NWS National Centers, especially to integrate and apply social science research findings to NWS products, practices and policies. Prior to joining NWS, Kim developed and led the Behavioral Insights Unit at the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO). She worked at the NOAA Weather Program Office as their first social scientist, and in that role, developed strategic approaches to support weather social science research. She was the 2013-2014 AMS/UCAR Congressional Science Fellow, and worked in the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley on a variety of environmental and hazard mitigation issues. Kim’s research involves behavioral science applied to weather and climate risk, especially in the communication of forecast uncertainty and response to hazardous weather warnings. She holds a PhD in Human/Hazards Geography from the University of Oklahoma, a Master’s degree in Professional Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics (with honors) and Synoptic Meteorology from Purdue University.

Dr. Greg McFarquhar is the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO) and a professor in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. He completed his B.Sc. in Mathematics & Physics at the University of Toronto, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Physics at the University of Toronto. He has worked as a faculty member at the University of Illinois, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union, President of the International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation, and former President of the American Meteorological Society on Cloud Physics. His research is making advances in understanding the properties of clouds and the processes occurring in clouds in order to improve the ability to represent clouds in weather and climate models. His work uses field observations, satellite retrievals and numerical modeling studies. He has conducted 36 field campaigns measuring clouds using aircraft in locations such as Alaska, Oklahoma, Newfoundland, Australia, Namibia, French Guyana, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Fiji, the Maldives and elsewhere, many of these projects using observing platforms from the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) and Research Aviation Facility (RAF). He is Chief Editor of the American Meteorological Society Monograph Collection, Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, and Special Editor for the Journal of Geophysical Research. He serves on the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committee and heads the DEI committee within CIWRO. He has 226 refereed journal publications, and he and his group have made 725 presentations at national and international conferences. He has received over $10 Million of research funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA and NOAA.

Dr. Yvette Richardson is a Professor in the Meteorology and Atmospheric Science Department at Penn State University and is the Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, where she oversees a center devoted to student support with academic advising, career counseling, and learning support for math and writing. Dr. Richardson’s research focuses on understanding the formation and evolution of severe storms through both numerical modeling and observations. In particular, her numerical modeling studies investigate the influence of temporal and spatial variations in environmental wind and/or temperature profiles on storm strength, rotational properties, and longevity. Her observational work has focused on understanding storm rotation, in particular tornado genesis and maintenance, using mobile radars and other instruments to collect fine-scale observations of thunderstorms and tornadoes. Dr. Richardson was a principal investigator in the International H2O Project (IHOP) and served as a steering committee member and principal investigator for the second phase of the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2). Dr. Richardson served as the chair of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) President’s Advisory Committee on University Relations (PACUR), as an editor of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) journal Monthly Weather Review, as an elected Councilor for the AMS, as the Planning Commissioner for the AMS, as the chair of the AMS Committee on Severe Local Storms, and as a member of the writing team for the National Academies Report Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences within the Weather Enterprise.  She currently serves on the UCAR Board of Trustees and the Advisory Council for the European Severe Storms Laboratory.  She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma in 1993 and 1999, respectively, and her B.S. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls in 1990.  She has been a professor at Penn State since 2002 and is an AMS Fellow.

Dr. Yolanda Shea received her B.S in Earth and Atmospheric Science from Cornell University in 2007 and her PhD from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012. Dr. Shea has been an atmospheric scientist at NASA Langley Research Center since 2012. She is the Project Scientist for the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder (CPF) mission, which will measure Earth-reflected spectrally resolved sunlight with unprecedented accuracy from the International Space Station. Her research interests include using the information in reflected sunlight to answer questions about Earth’s changing climate.

Dr. Ping Yang is University Distinguished Professor and holds the David Bullock Harris Chair in geosciences at Texas A&M University (TAMU), where he currently serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences, a large college comprised of 18 departments and 25 centers/institutes. He was Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences (2012-2018) and Associate Dean for Research (2019-2022) in the College of Geosciences at TAMU. Dr. Yang has supervised/co-supervised the completion of 32 doctoral dissertations and 20 master’s degree theses. He has published 376 referred journal papers, thirteen invited book chapters, and four books. His publications have been cited 25,158 times (Google Scholar)/16,606 times (Web of Science) with an H-index of 82 (Google Scholar)/63 (Web of Science), as of 04/02/2024. His research focuses on light scattering, radiative transfer, and remote sensing. Since joining TAMU, Yang has been extramurally funded for 84 research projects. Yang is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), OPTICA (formally, the Optical Society of America), The Electromagnetics Academy, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Yang received a number of awards/honors, including the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (2017), the Ascent Award by the AGU Atmospheric Science Section (2013), the David and Lucille Atlas Remote Sensing Prize by AMS (2020), and the van de Hulst Light-Scattering Award by Elsevier (2022), and a university-level faculty research award (2017) bestowed by The TAMU Association of Former Students (AFS). Dr. Yang was an elected member of the International Radiation Commission (IRC) under the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (2012-2020) and was appointed as one of the 16 members of the U.S. National Research Council-Space Studies Board’s Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space (October 2018- June 2022). He was an editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (2015-2020). Dr. Yang currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, and an editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. He is a co-chair of the IEEE GRSS (Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society) Modeling in Remote Sensing (MIRS) Technical Committee.