CPO is pleased to announce the selection of two excellent graduate students as recipients of the CPO-funded American Meteorological Society (AMS) Graduate Fellowship for 2020/2021. Anxhelho Agastra and Kathleen Abbott were selected from among 57 highly qualified applicants for the $25,000 fellowship, intended to support students for one academic year. The AMS Fellowship is one of a suite of investments in higher education that CPO makes to support the development of the next generation of atmospheric scientists. CPO has supported 2-3 AMS Fellows per year for more than 20 years.
Anxelho will begin his Master of Science degree in meteorology this fall, focusing on forecasting of fire weather and climate modeling, two areas highly relevant to the Earth System Science and Modeling Division and thus to CPO’s mission. His thesis research grew out of an undergraduate research project conducted while a BS student at Florida State University, for which he won a Poster Presentation award at the AMS Annual Meeting in Boston in January 2020. The purpose of this project was to improve predictions of variability in prescribed fires using regression models and machine learning.
Kathleen Abbott will be entering a Master’s program in physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) this fall. She recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley with BS degrees in geophysics and math. The focus of her thesis research will be biophysical processes, specifically oceanic carbon flux.
