Minghua Zhang

Minghua Zhang is Dean and Director of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. He received PhD at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He joined Stony Brook in 1988 as a postdoctoral scholar. He later became an Assistant and Associate Professor, then Professor and Director of the Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres for ten years, and Associate Dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences for eight years before he became Dean of SoMAS. He is also the Director of the Marine Sciences Research Center. Dr. Zhang's research focuses on numerical modeling of climate and global climate change. It includes development and analysis of physical parameterizations in general circulation models, diagnostic study of feedback processes in the climate system, understanding of past and future climate changes, by using models and measurements from satellites and other sources. His research on model development focuses on moist processes related to clouds, radiation, convections, boundary layer turbulence, and their interactions, with the goal of improving global models to more accurately predict climate change on a wide range of time and spatial scales. He has also participated in several field large-scale atmospheric field experiments and developed a variational method to integrate heterogeneous measurements from multiple measurement platforms with results used by most major climate modeling centers in the world. He also does research on the dynamics of large-scale atmospheric waves, such as their excitation, propagation, dissipation, and interaction with atmospheric circulations

Dr. Zhang is Principal Investigator of the US Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) and the Climate Change and Prediction Program (CCPP), Principal Investigator of the NASA Modeling and Analysis Program (MAP), and a past recipient of the Early Faculty Award of the National Science Foundation. He has authored or co-authored more than100 papers and two books​ on climate and atmospheric sciences. He has served on many editorial boards, including as Editor of the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES). He also serves on many advisory and professional committees, including the Advisory Committee of the US Department of Energy on Biological and Environmental Research (BERAC)​, the Steering Committee of the International Global Water and Energy Cycle Program (GEWEX)​, and the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Change Program of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST)​. He is an elected member of the Eurasian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of American Meteorological Society, ​ and a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).