OU Advisory Board
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Georgia Kosmopoulou
Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
John Antonio
Senior Associate Dean of COE, University of Oklahoma.
Randy Hewes
Interim Dean Graduate College, University of Oklahoma.
Alicia Knoedler
Associate Vice President for Research, University of Oklahoma.
Simin Pulat
Vice Provost for Faculty Development, University of Oklahoma.
External Advisory Board
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Winifred Frick
Senior Dir. of Cons. Science, Bat Conservation International, Santa Cruz, California.
Dr. Frick brings a wealth of international conservation experience to the NRT advisory board. She has worked with non-governmental agencies on issues related to human-wildlife conflicts in the lower atmosphere, the biodiversity of this important habitat, as well as its conservation. Dr Frick’s research focused on bat ecology and conservation for the past 15 years and she is an adjunct assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her active research program focuses on understanding how bat populations respond to natural and anthropogenic perturbations. This background enables Dr. Frick to advise the NRT program as we seek to grow connections to the international NGO community in an effort to provide diverse training opportunities for our NRT students.
Jeffrey Morisette
Director, North Central Climate Science Center, Fort Collins, Colorado.
Dr. Morisette brings his experience as director of the North Central Climate Science Center to the NRT Advisory Board. This Center is one of a set of regional centers that includes the South Central Climate Science Center located at OU. As the director, Dr. Morisette manages and conducts research on how natural and cultural land management can respect the non-stationary nature of climate. A current research theme is how dynamic species distribution models can contribute to vulnerability assessment and adaptation planning. This research has parallels with many of the questions and approaches that we expect our NRT students to confront.
Geoffrey Henebry
Senior Scientist, Geospatial Center of Excellence, University of South Dakota.
Dr. Henebry brings expertise and guidance about achieving excellence at the interface of academic, governmental, and private sectors. His experience at the Geospatial Center of Excellence in South Dakota gives him insights into how these sectors interact to set priorities for applied science questions. Dr. Henebry is a landscape ecologist whose basic & applied research focuses on using geospatial time series to characterize, model, and understand diverse ecological and biogeophysical phenomena. This background makes his advice about how to grow from our NSF funded training program into a sustainable center of excellence at OU for addressing basic and applied problems in aeroecology.
Warren Thomas
Managing General Partner, Tinker Business and Industrial Park, Midwest City, Oklahoma.
Mr. Thomas brings a wealth of private sector experience in Oklahoma to the NRT Advisory Board. Mr. Thomas has more than forty years of experience in private sector business including banking, oil & gas, real estate investments and technology-commercialization. He also serves on the Oklahoma Governor’s Science and Technology Council and has diverse connections to areas of potential growth for our program and the University of Oklahoma. This diverse background makes Mr. Thomas an invaluable advisor for the NRT’s efforts to grow connections with private industry in Oklahoma and elsewhere in ways that are valuable to NRT students.
Derek Arndt
Chief, Monitoring Branch, National Centers for Environmental Information, Asheville NC.
Mr. Arndt has served as the Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center since 2009. This background enables Mr. Arndt to provide key insights into NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, which is a key federal agency with responsibility for atmospheric and terrestrial data and resources that are central to the science mission of our program. The Branch is responsible for analysis and reporting of the status of the Earth’s climate system, from large global phenomena like global temperature (“global warming”), to regional occurrences like drought and weather extremes. Mr. Arndt was one of the lead editors for 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 editions of The State of the Climate, an annual supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, featuring input and analysis from 400+ authors in nearly 50 countries. Before coming to NCDC, he spent 15 years at the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. Mr. Arndt holds a B.S. and M.S. in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma.
