Jonathan Mitchell and Aradhna Tripati have each won a Hellman Fellowship to support their research.
Tripati works on developing and applying novel geochemical tools that can be used to probe the response of biological and climatic processes to rising levels of carbon dioxide.
Mitchell’s project focuses on understanding the methane weather observed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. His group uses an innovative observation-simulation methodology, which allowed them to successfully identify the atmospheric waves responsible for a pair of clouds observed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Simulations of cloud-free observations at 938?nm with lines of latitude and longitude used for comparison with models that include cloud opacity distributions.
The fellowship was established last year at UCLA but the Hellman family started the program in 1994;at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. The Hellman Fellows Program now supports junior faculty at 13 institutions, including nine UC campuses. More than 650 UC faculty are now Hellman Fellows.
http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/1-25m-hellman-donation-to-ucla-202499.aspx