Amber is a program director at NSF. Prior to joining NSF, she was a tenure-track professor at an R1 university. Amber manages two programs for NSF: GEO Opportunities for Leadership in Diversity (GOLD) and Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Pathways into the Earth, Ocean, Polar and Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences (GEOPAths). She is participating in NSF’s midterm site visit evaluating UCAR's cooperative agreement. She makes recommendations to the Geoscience Directorate on how NSF funds should be spent on research and science education. She is also an advisor to the American Geophysical Union's Sharing Science program.

Time spent on the site: minutes
Domain expertise: low
Long-term influence: high

• Funding highly leveraged projects
• Creating pathways into Earth Science
• Advancing the careers of a diverse population

• Accessibility
• Personnel who help to develop the careers of students and early career scientists

• An overview of the scope of DART's applicability
• A sense of the team's ideals
• A list of recent research accomplishments
• An explanation of DAReS outreach efforts

Bishan Bakshi

BS Chemistry and Statistics, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar
MS Atmospheric Science, University of Washington

Bishan is an atmospheric chemistry modeler. He is familiar with Bayesian statistics and atmospheric models and was recently hired on a two-year contract position at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where he does ozone modeling using MPAS. His first language is Punjabi and he learned English in elementary school. He has lived in the United States for 4 years.

Time spent on the site: days
Domain expertise: high
Long-term influence: medium

• Completing his modeling project within his two-year contract
• Publishing his results

• Instructions written in an easy to understand fashion
• Being able to find relevant content
• Getting his data assimilation system up and running quickly

• Documentation with a clear organizational hierarchy
• Easy-to-use model interfaces

Charlie Christie

BS Physics, College of Charleston
Graduate student in Physical Oceanography, University of Rhode Island

Charlie is somewhat familiar with the oceanographic literature and has two years of experience completing deterministic runs with a regional ocean model. He was exposed to frequentist statistics in his undergraduate physics labs. He is writing his PhD prospectus and plans to use DART and the regional ocean model to study warm core ring shedding in the Gulf Stream. Although he is at one of the top oceanography programs in the country, the University of Rhode Island does not offer any courses in data assimilation or inverse methods. The most applicable course Charlie has taken was a numerical modeling course that included a short section on parameter estimation. Charlie is also colorblind.

Time spent on the site: weeks
Domain expertise: medium
Long-term influence: variable

• Completing the project outlined in his prospectus

• The ability to create original research

• Instructional material to bridge the gap between what he's learned in graduate school and what he needs to know to do ensemble DA
• A user guide that shepherds him from low-order models to his regional model
• Help with scientific workflow