Dr. Wang presented a keynote on “Present and future land use land cover changes in North Africa : the Impacts of climate and socioeconomic drivers” for a workshop organized by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

Dr. Wang gave a talk in the CEE department at Northwestern University on “Understanding the impact of soil moisture on precipitation over the U.S.: Mechanisms and challenges”.

Dr. Miao Yu completed her postdoctoral appointment in our group and is moving back to a faculty position at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. Miao spent a very productive three years here and has collaborated with almost everyone in the group. We look forward to future collaborations with her as she further develops her career in China. Miao, we will all miss you!

Dr. Wang visited the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences with a long time collaborator Liangzhi You from IFPRI, and gave a talk on “Climate and agricultural land use modeling”.

Dr. Wang gave a talk on “Interactive Land Use-Climate Change Predictions in West Africa” at the AGU fall meeting. Dana Parr, Miao Yu, Farzan Ahmed, and Congsheng Fu from our group all gave poster presentations at the meeting.

Jeehee Kim successfully defended her M.S. thesis. Congratulations!

Dr. Zhenming Ji joint the group as a visiting scholar. He is a postdoctoral associate from Dr. Jeremy Pal’s group at the Loyola Marymount University. He will be working with both Wang and Pal on the NSF-funded EaSM project. Welcome to Zhenming!

Amir Erfanian joined the group as a new PhD student. His dissertation research will focus on vegetation-climate interactions and regional climate modeling. Welcome!

Dr. Wang visited Professor Dagang Wang (an alumnus of our group) at Sun Yat-Sen University in China and gave a talk on “land-atmosphere interactions and climate variability at time scales from sub-seasonal to decadal”. It was great to see Dagang again six years after he left UConn!

Upon her return from China, Dr. Wang gave a talk at UC-Davis and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on ecosystem-climate interactions.

Di Wu successfully defended his M.S. thesis. Congratulations!