 |
Director's NoteTom Achtor |
Changes in our Human Resources Department
Most of you know that Sally Loy is retiring at the end of April. Sally’s expertise and leadership heading our human resources department is without peer. Sally has been committed to helping solve a wide variety of HR issues for all of our staff members, visitors and students. Her expertise in working within the UW-Madison system and her warm, friendly demeanor will be missed.
Kate Kaminski will be joining SSEC as the new HR Manager. Kate comes to us with over 10 years of HR experience on campus and previously worked at United Parcel Service (UPS) as a HR Specialist.
Kate started with University Housing in 2002 working with new employee orientation, classified examinations and recruitment. She transferred to the School of Education and was responsible for Unclassified/AS recruitments, payroll, rate and titles, job security and everything else that goes with Unclassified/AS staffing.
In October 2008 Kate began employment at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC) as the Human Resources Manager. She has been responsible for overseeing the personnel process including: payroll and benefits; coordination and supervision of the Center’s human resources-related activities such as recruitment and staffing; labor relations (i.e. discipline, grievances, layoff/non-renewal); advising management, principal investigators, supervisors and staff on internal, University and state policies and procedures related to the personnel process; and supervision and direction of the Human Resources Assistant and Payroll and Benefit employee.
Kate has learned a lot at the Primate Center and is excited to bring her institutional knowledge and skills to SSEC. Kate will be starting work half time at SSEC on Monday April 9th while she also works to close out her duties and hire her replacement at the Primate Center. Welcome Kate!
Personal stuff (from Kate): I am married to a great guy named Brian (he is a high school teacher in Sun Prairie) and we have 2 kids. Abby 6 (kindergarten) and Jerry is 7 (first grade).
NOAA Proposal Season
In late winter and spring of each year, CIMSS scientists are very busy preparing their proposals to NOAA as part of our partnership with NESDIS/STAR and the ASPB scientists at CIMSS. NOAA meetings, reviews and proposal competitions occur throughout the year, but it seems their funding is only available in the last two quarters of the Federal Fiscal Year (April-September). Cooperative Institute and ASPB scientists compete in NOAA programs to fund their ideas and projects. When funding decisions are made, we are contacted to put together the final proposal document and budget, and submit them through the CIMSS Cooperative Agreement (a 5-year award that allows many “amendments” (new project funding). Often multiple awards for a NOAA program are “bundled” into one large proposal. With both the GOES-R and the SuomiNPP missions deploying new measurement systems there are new opportunities to apply our knowledge and expertise building algorithms and applying the data to scientific ideas.
We recently submitted 4 large proposals for GOES-R; the Algorithm Working Group, Risk Reduction, Proving Ground and High Impact Weather Studies. These 4 proposals contain over 25 individual research projects from many CIMSS and ASPB investigators. We also submitted 3 large proposals for Suomi NPP which contained over 20 individual research projects from CIMSS and ASPB investigators. The very busy proposal season is not over quite yet, but our largest proposals are in.
If the proposal work wasn’t enough, the CIMSS scientists and our administrative team are in the process of putting together the CIMSS Cooperative Agreement Annual Report. This past year we had 77 separate research projects that we are reporting on. The Report, which will be delivered to NOAA and made available to interested persons by the end of April, demonstrates our world-class science and our close partnership with NOAA.
SUOMI NPP
Now to end this month’s note, here is an amusing email that Hank received from Jim Gleason, Chief Scientist of the Suomi NPP mission. To appreciate the email, you need to know that the people who live in what we call Finland, call their country “Suomi”.
Dear Dr. Gleason
What is the explanation for the name “Suomi” (in Suomi NPP)? If the program were called “France NPP” or “Indonesia NPP” there would be questions, no? What does Finland have to do with this program?
