Alumnus Xue Zheng of the Class of 1999, from the department of atmospheric sciences, who is now a research scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is recipient of the 2021 Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science Early Career Research Program award.
Xue Zheng is among 83 scientists nationwide selected for the recognition. Under the program, typical awards for DOE national laboratory staff are $500,000 per year for five years. The Early Career Research Program, now in its 12 year, is designed to bolster scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.
Xue Zheng, a research scientist in the Atmospheric, Earth and Energy Division in the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate, was nominated in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research category for her work in aerosol-cloud processes in which she analyzes atmospheric observations and climate models to advance the understanding of cloud response to aerosols over ocean and land.
"I feel earnestly grateful to win the award," Zheng said. "I've been inspired by previous award winners' research in my area since I started my postdoc in the Lab. It is a tremendous honor for me to receive this award."
Aerosol particles in the atmosphere can affect the Earth's climate directly by scattering or absorbing radiation or indirectly by changing the properties of clouds (such as cloud particle size or cloud lifetime). This "aerosol indirect effect" on liquid-phase clouds remains highly uncertain in present and future climate scenarios. Zheng's project uses DOE's long-term Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) observations, complemented by satellite retrievals and numerical simulations, to study the aerosol indirect effect on liquid-phase clouds.
Zheng's research area focuses on cloud parameterizations in climate models with her primary interest in boundary layer cloud processes and aerosol cloud interactions. The additional funding will allow her to implement some advanced statistic techniques to better detect the aerosol-cloud interactions in DOE ARM observations and DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM).