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.

The GCC 2013 organizing committee would like to thank all of our applicants for submitting a greatly interesting and diverse group of abstracts for this year’s conference.  Applicants can expect to receive notifications of their acceptance status later this week.

Furthermore, we have used your applications and research interests to choose the following topics for the sessions in GCC 2013:

• Paleoclimate and Cryosphere
• Hydroclimate
• Aerosols and Cloud Chemistry
• Humans, Climate, and Policy
• Terrestrial Impacts
• Tropical Dynamics
• Extratropical Dynamics
• Ocean Dynamics
• Ocean Biology and Chemistry

Check back here and on the Program page later in the summer for more information about the details of the sessions and the schedule of the conference!

The application deadline for the 2013 Graduate Climate Conference has now passed. We’re pleased to announce a significant growth in interest for this year’s conference – there are many very interesting abstracts representing a huge swath of science and policy which we look forward to reading!

We hope to notify applicants of their acceptance by mid-July. In the meantime, check back often for details on this year’s conference, including information on accommodations in Woods Hole, post-conference activities on the Cape and in Boston, as well as the program/sessions we’ve structured based on your applications and research interests.

Here are a few commonly asked questions that we have been receiving regarding the logistics of the GCC:

1. What is the conference registration fee? There is no registration fee!

2. What are the costs for food and lodging during the conference? Our generous sponsors are covering the cost of food and lodging for all conference attendees, so you don’t have to worry about that! If you can get yourself to Boston, MA, we’ll take care of the rest. More info is on our logistics page.

3. When will we hear if our abstract has been accepted? We hope to notify applicants in mid-July, both of their abstract acceptance and presentation type (oral or poster).

4. Do we have to present original research in order to attend? If you are a graduate student, yes. It doesn’t need to be a complete project, but everyone must present some sort of original research. If you are not sure you will have enough results to present, contact us at gcc-2013@mit.edu and we can discuss your situation. If you are an undergraduate student, you are certainly welcome to present something, but it is not required.

5. Are travel grants available to international students? We anticipate having some amount of travel funding available for international students, but as it depends on our ongoing fundraising efforts and there are some restrictions on how we can use certain funds, we cannot guarantee anything. But we will do our best to award travel funding to as many students in need as possible!

If you still have unanswered questions, feel free to contact us at gcc-2013@mit.edu. Don’t forget to submit your abstracts by 11:59 PM tomorrow, Friday June 7!

The abstract deadline for the 2013 Graduate Climate Conference is in just over 2 weeks! Applications will remain open through June 7, so make sure to submit your application soon so that you don’t miss out!

Invitations to participate will be awarded on a competitive basis, as will limited travel funding.  The application is open to graduate students, and to undergrads who will be in their junior or senior year as of Fall 2013.

To apply to the conference, please fill out the form at this link:
GCC 2013 Application

Applications are now open for participation in the 2013 Graduate Climate Conference!  Invitations to participate will be awarded on a competitive basis, as will limited travel funding.  The application is open to graduate students, and to undergrads who will be in their junior or senior year as of Fall 2013.  Applications will remain open through June 7.

To apply to the conference, please fill out the form at this link:
GCC 2013 Application

Advertising for the 2013 edition of the Graduate Climate Conference is in full swing! We’ve sent announcements out to over a hundred climate science departments across the country (and world!) and are working on getting the call for papers posted on calendars of meetings and earth science/climate list serves. To aid in advertising, we’ve created a snazzy flyer. Click on the thumbnail below to view it as a pdf. Please feel free to print it out and post it in your department!

The GCC 2013 organizing committee is pleased to announce that the 7th annual Graduate Climate Conference will be held from November 1-3, 2013.  The Graduate Climate Conference is a climate research conference organized and held by graduate students, for graduate students.  This conference is designed to allow young research scientists to share their research with peers from diverse areas of the climate research community.  At the conference, students will establish connections with, learn from, and socialize with other young scientists from various institutions across the country and around the world.