From Badenoch to Boulder to build a world weather model
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An ex-Kingussie High School pupil has been recognised for her ‘detective work’ in the fight against global warming.
Dr Isla Simpson has been honoured by two prominent American organisations in earth science for landmark research into the atmosphere and climate modelling.
Dr Simpson, whose parents Alan and Jo Simpson live in Kingussie’s West Terrace, has been awarded The Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award and the Bernhard Haurwitz Memorial Lecture by the American Meteorological Society. At the same time, the American Geophysical Union has awarded her its Atmospheric Science Ascent Award for her work in large scale atmospheric dynamics and climate modelling. The citation for the AGU Award describes her as “one of the top atmospheric dynamacists of her generation” and a “climate detective” par excellence. The 38-year-old laureate’s work is recognised for improving the understanding of the large scale atmospheric circulation and dynamical mechanisms that give rise to climate variability and change.
“I’m delighted,” Dr Simpson told the Strathy from her home of seven years in Boulder in Colorado. “Frankly, it came as a bit of a surprise. I certainly didn’t expect it.”
She said she considered herself privileged to be at the heart of the great global warming debate.
The joint millennium Dux at Kingussie went on to achieve a First Class honour’s Master of Physics in Astrophysics degree from the University of St Andrews and a PhD in Atmospheric Physics from Imperial College London.
She then furthered her career as a post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto before working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.
Since 2015 she has been a scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory in America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
More on this story in latest Strathy
