Scripps Oceanography Director's Prize Awarded to Two Graduate Students

Two graduate students at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, will share the Edward A. Frieman Prize, an annual recognition of excellence in graduate student research. The award ceremony will be held on Friday, August 4, at 3 p.m. at the Scripps Library.

The Frieman Prize was established in 1996 to celebrate the 70th birthday of Scripps Institution's eighth director, Edward A. Frieman, who led Scripps from 1986 to 1996. The prize is awarded annually to a Scripps graduate student who has published an outstanding research paper in the past 12 months, as evaluated by a Scripps faculty committee.

For the first time this year, the Frieman Prize committee has chosen two students instead of the customary one: geophysics graduate student Renee Bulow and climate sciences graduate student Hyodae Seo.

Bulow is being honored for her research paper, "New events discovered in the Apollo lunar seismic data," which was published in the October 27, 2005, issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research and was co-authored by her Scripps advisors, Catherine Johnson and Peter Shearer.

"Renee's paper describes the discovery of previously unidentified deep seismic events on the Moon, using data from the Apollo missions," said Johnson. "Her paper is a significant contribution to future studies of lunar seismicity, tides and lunar internal structure. It is also an example of how modern methods can be used to glean much more information from unique legacy data sets than could perhaps have ever been imagined in the 1970s, when the data were originally collected."

Bulow, who is from Redding, Calif., received her B.S. in physics from UC Berkeley in 2000. She plans to complete her Ph.D. in 2007 and will then go on to postdoctoral work at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris.

Seo is receiving the Frieman Prize for his paper, "Effect of ocean mesoscale variability on the mean state of tropical Atlantic climate," which was published in the May 9, 2006, issue of Geophysical Research Letters and was co-authored by Markus Jochum of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Raghu Murtugudde of the University of Maryland and Scripps climate scientist Arthur Miller, who is Seo's co-advisor.

"Shortly after arriving at Scripps, Hyodae learned how to run two state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated models. Learning to use either one of them is difficult, but mastering both is phenomenal," said Miller. "Hyodae did all the work in designing and testing the model domain to make sure it allowed a believable climatology, executing the preliminary and final experiments to test the hypotheses of the effects of the ocean mesoscale on atmospheric rainfall, analyzing all the model experiments to diagnose the physics and writing up the results."

Fourth-year climate student Seo, who is from Seoul, South Korea, completed a B.S. degree at Yonsei University in South Korea.