Killeen Is AGU’s President-Elect

The American Geophysical Union has a new president-elect: Timothy Killeen, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and a senior scientist at its High Altitude Observatory. He becomes president-elect on 1 July, and in 2006 will succeed John A. Orcutt (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), who becomes president this year.

Killeen has a BS in physics and astronomy (1972) and a PhD in atomic and molecular physics (1975), both from University College London. He was at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for more than 20 years, first as a researcher and professor of atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences and then as director of the university’s space physics research laboratory and associate vice-president for research. In 1992, he was a visiting senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Killeen says he is “honored to have been nominated and elected to serve the AGU,” which, he says, is “the preeminent professional society representing more than 40 000 geoscientists worldwide.” He adds that “the next several years will be both challenging and exciting as we learn more about how the Earth system functions and, in particular, how human activities affect that system in profound ways.”

Other AGU officers elected include Terry E. Tullis (Brown University), who was reelected as general secretary, and Anny A. Cazenave (Laboratoire d’Etudes en Geophysique et Océanographie Spatiales and Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), who was reelected as international secretary. Both candidates were unopposed.