COAA

COAA SCC 2014 Annual Summer Workshop

September 2014 - On September 6th, the 2014 Annual Summer Workshop of COAA SCC (Chinese-American Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Southern California Chapter) was held successfully at the beautiful campus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. This is the first COAA SCC event held at San Diego. More than 45 members and their families from various institutes in Southern California came together to enjoy this event by the beautiful La Jolla Beach. This year's theme is "the Passion of Young Scientists". A total of 17 presentations were made by graduate students and postdocs covering a wide variety of topics spanning from the clouds on Venus, fire in the forest, to the distribution of Albacore Tuna in the Pacific Ocean.

The vice-chair, Dr. Yu Gu (UCLA) announced the start of the event. Dr. Jonathan Jiang (JPL), Chair of COAA SCC, introduced the theme and agenda of the workshop, and greeted all the participants with a warm opening remark. During the luncheon, through her own stories, Dr. Hui Su (JPL) shared with the audience the challenges and attitude to overcome these challenges as a female scientist. Seventeen young scientists presented their work afterwards, which were appraised by a panel of six judges. The judges spoke highly about all the presentations. Four speakers were awarded as "the Best Presentation". They are (by alphabetical order): Cenlin He (UCLA), Jianghao Wang (USC), Peter Gao (Caltech) and Xi Xi (Caltech).

Dr. Jonathan Jiang presented the award certificates to the awardees and concluded the oral sessions of the workshop. Dr. Jiang, on behalf of COAA SCC, extended the warmest congratulations to Alice Zhai (La Canada High School), the youngest member of COAA SCC, for being a Laureate of Davidson Fellowship and publishing her hurricane study on Environmental Research Letters, and to Professor Yongkang Xue (UCLA), the founder of COAA SCC, for his recently funded $2.15 million NSF project. A picnic dinner was later on held at the beach. All the participants enjoyed the food, lively conversations, and beautiful seaside sunset together, which marked the ending of this successful event. Local host Dr. Guang Zhang (COAA SCC regional director at UCSD) is acknowledged for the support of this event.

COAA SCC is a COAA local chapter that extends the collaboration effort and bridges the communications of Chinese scholars among different regions of the United States. Regional activities are welcome to report to COAA news (news@coaaweb.org). COAA local chapters are encouraged to initiate local CFC campaigns to seek support for activities in their chapters. Please contact a COAA board member for more details.

For a full list of all the presentations, please visit here.