Jagdish Shukla

Background

Shukla was born in 1944 in the village of Mirdha in the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, India.

Education

He studied science, firstly outside school, then at South Carolina (U.S.) At Banaras Hindu University, he passed Bachelor of Science (honors) at the age of 18 with Physics, Mathematics, and Geology (first class) followed after a brief interval from studies by an Master of Science in Geophysics in 1964 and Doctor of Philosophy in Geophysics in 1971 as an external student of Banaras Hindu University. He subsequently gained an Doctor of Science in Meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976.

Career

He passed from the South.R.S. High School, Sheopur, in the first class with distinction in Mathematics and Sanskrit. College, Ballia. Shukla is a Distinguished University Professor at George Mason University, United States of America, and chair of the Climate Dynamics department. He also works concurrently as the president of Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a tax free non-profit.

His contributions to the understanding of the predictability of weather and climate include the Asian monsoon dynamics, deforestation and desertification.

He is the author or co-author of over 150 scientific papers. He helped found weather and climate research centers in India and was the founding scientific leader at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in New Delhi.

He has also established research institutions in Brazil, Italy, and the United States of America. He has been associated with the World Climate Research Programme since its inception and was involved in their Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere program (TOGA), the first coupled atmosphere-ocean initiative. He founded and directed the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, which aims to improve understanding of climate variability and predictability on intraseasonal to decadal time scales within a changing climate.

He has established Gandhi College in his village for education of rural students especially women.

Positions He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, a Fellow of the Indian Meteorological Society and an Associate Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences. On 1 September 2015, Shukla was lead author of a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and OSTP Director John Holdren. This letter was cited the following October by Representative Lamar Smith (R–Texas) in an announcement of plans to investigate Shukla"s IGES.

Achievements

• Shukla Received 2012 Padma Shri Award from the Government of India. 52nd International Meteorological Organization Prize by the World Meteorological Organization in 2008. Walker Gold Medal of the Indian Meteorological Society Carl Gustav Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Membership

Since 2001, he has been a member of its Joint Scientific Committee and chair of its Modelling Panel. He is currently a member of the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Program of the World Meteorological Organization and a Commissioner in the Virginia Governor"s Commission on Climate Change.