The GCC 2013 Executive Committee is pleased to announce that the keynote address at this year’s conference will be given by Caroline Ummenhofer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Caroline will be speaking about her experiences with the transition from being a graduate student to holding a faculty position, as well as communicating climate science to external audiences.

Caroline Ummenhofer received a Joint Honours B.Sc. in Marine Biology and Physical Oceanography from the University of Wales, Bangor, UK, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics, specializing in climate modeling, from The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Her PhD thesis received the Uwe Radok Award in ocean/atmosphere/climate science by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Caroline was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, held a Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellowship at UNSW, and was a Visiting Fellow with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Australia. Since 2012, she is an Assistant Scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, USA. Her research interests include interannual to decadal climate variability, the hydrological cycle, monsoon dynamics, ocean-atmosphere interactions, droughts, extratropical climate, hydroclimate paleo reconstructions of the last millennium, and the effects of climate variability and change on agriculture. In particular, her research focuses on Indian Ocean dynamics, its variability and role for regional rainfall variations and droughts in the surrounding countries, spanning from seasonal to decadal timescales. Her research on the importance of a re-occurring Indian Ocean temperature pattern for Australian rainfall was awarded the prestigious 2008 Land & Water Australia Eureka Prize for Water Research and Innovation and is meanwhile routinely used by the Department of Agriculture and Food in Western Australia as one of five key indicators of growing season rainfall for farmers. A key goal of Caroline’s research has been to bridge the gap between ocean and climate dynamics and its impacts on end users. As such, she aims to provide practical outcomes of use to stakeholders in the agriculture and water management sectors, interacting with media, farmers’ organizations, and the broader public.