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Dr.
Sytske Kimball joined the University of South Alabama
faculty in August 1999, after graduate school at the
Pennsylvania State University. During her first year
at South Alabama she completed her Ph.D. thesis and
flew back to a snow covered Pennsylvania for a successful
Ph.D. defense in January 2000.
Dr.
Kimball has been a world traveler since her family moved
from Europe
to Singapore in 1970
and her university degrees were acquired on three different
continents.
She completed her
undergraduate degree in applied mathematics in 1988
at the Delft
University of Technology in
Delft, The Netherlands. After briefly working for Dutch
Telecom
designing telephone networks,
she moved to Australia in 1989 to join the CSIRO Division
of Atmospheric
Research as a
research assistant working on tropical cyclones. Always
having been
interested in Earth Sciences,
she went back to school to obtain her M.S. in meteorology
at Monash
University in Melbourne,
Australia. This was followed by a resignation from CSIRO
three years
later, to join the graduate
program at the Pennsylvania State University to pursue
a Ph.D. in
meteorology.
While
in graduate school Sytske Kimball worked as a teaching
assistant, teaching dynamical meteorology and a physical
meteorology laboratory, which sparked an interest in
teaching. A further highlight of her graduate student
career came during a visit to the Hurricane Research
Division in Miami when she experienced a research flight
through Tropical Storm Josephine. In the summer of 1997
she was selected to take part in a two week hurricane
landfall colloquium organized by NCAR, during which
leading hurricane experts and researchers shared their
knowledge to a small group of students. This highly
informative, 2 week colloquium, has given her valuable
information towards pursuing her research interest in
hurricanes.
Dr.
Kimball's research interests focus on hurricanes and
hurricane modeling and she has presented numerous papers
on this topic at various conferences. She has received
grants from USARC, NASA, SUN Microsystems and NSF
to support hurricane research. Having moved to South
Alabama she is looking forward to experiencing her first
hurricane on land and hopes to collect valuable research
data when this occasion arises. Her teaching duties
include dynamical, physical, and tropical meteorology,
as well as a course focusing on computer applications
in meteorology. She is currently the historian for the
Women in Science group at the University of South Alabama
which provides mentoring and organizes workshops for
women in science at all levels (from undergraduate to
full professor) and promotes young girls to develop
an interest in mathematics and science by organizing
Expanding Your Horizon days at the University of South
Alabama.
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