Dr. Bette L. Otto-Bliesner receives the department’s Distinguished Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement
November 14, 2022The Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department is pleased to announce that Dr. Bette L. Otto-Bliesner has been selected to receive the department’s Distinguished Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement.
Dr. Otto-Bliesner received her Bachelors (1972), Masters (1974), and PhD (1980), all in Meteorology, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With her extensive scientific accomplishments and international leadership in the field of paleoclimate, she is one of the most distinguished alumni in the history of the AOS department. Her outstanding work on a broad range of paleoclimate questions has crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries and shaped our understanding of past climates from hundreds of millions of years ago to the Holocene and into the projected future. The range of climate problems that she has worked on is exceedingly broad, incorporating multiple distinct components of the climate system, including the ocean, vegetation, the atmosphere, and cryosphere.
She has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, most notably the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Emiliani Lecture, and she was elected Fellow of both the AGU and the American Meteorological Society. Because of her many achievements, she was selected as a lead author of the Paleoclimate chapter in the Fourth and Fifth IPCC assessment reports.
Dr. Otto-Bliesner has also made unselfish contributions in service to the paleoclimate community. She has organized or contributed to many international modeling or model-data comparison projects, and she has served as mentor for graduate students, postdocs, and early career scientists, including four UW-Madison alumni. She has also maintained active scientific ties with the department and with UW-Madison’s Center for Climate Research, co-authoring 43 publications with UW-Madison scientists since 1982.
The award will be formally conferred during the AOS Alumni Reception at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Denver, Colorado on Tuesday evening, January 10, 2023.