Yuan Wang has pioneered interdisciplinary approaches that integrate numerical models with spaceborne, in situ and laboratory measurements to make breakthrough discoveries in critical scientific areas that have significant societal implications, including climate change, air pollution and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yuan has made fundamental advances in our understanding of how the climate system works. This includes the fundamental mechanisms of aerosol-cloud-climate interactions, which have been one of the greatest uncertainties in the future trajectory of climate change. Yuan’s work was among the first to quantitatively establish two forms of invigoration of deep convective clouds by aerosols — microphysical and thermodynamic — that are now recognized as profoundly impacting precipitation and hence the hydrological cycle and climate. Yuan has also helped to understand and constrain the radiative effect of clouds, including through a novel combination of atmospheric observations and cloud-resolving simulations that revealed how anthropogenic aerosols significantly contribute as ice nucleating particles to altering the ice crystal size in clouds under different atmospheric convection systems. Further, Yuan has also been a pioneer in understanding the influence of aerosols on atmospheric circulation and extreme events, including sophisticated use of a hierarchy of models to study the impacts of pollution on midlatitude circulation.

A hallmark of Yuan’s research is his creativity, flexibility and courage in tackling the most difficult problems. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Yuan was at the forefront of understanding multiple dimensions of the atmospheric response. Early in the pandemic, there was considerable anticipation that lockdowns and other sheltering would cause decreases in air pollution. However, using a combination of observations and process-based models, Yuan’s group identified — and diagnosed the causes of — unexpected air pollution that occurred in northern China despite very large reductions in emissions. This study creatively leveraged an unexpected natural Earth system experiment to glean fundamental new insight into the processes that regulate atmospheric composition — insights that are also highly relevant for climate and air quality mitigation policies. Yuan has continued to leverage the COVID-19 disruption to generate key insights, including how changes in vehicle traffic influenced local air quality and climate and the impact of the lockdowns on regional and global carbon dioxide emissions.

Yuan’s contributions within the first 10 years of his Ph.D. are truly remarkable and would make for a very productive career for any of us. We look forward to the breakthroughs and insights that are to come!

— Noah S. Diffenbaugh
Stanford University
Stanford, California

I am deeply humbled and honored to receive the AGU James B. Macelwane Medal. I want to first thank Noah Diffenbaugh for leading the nomination and the people who have supported me for this recognition and others. For me, getting this prestigious early-career award is nothing but a testament to the incredible support and guidance I have received along my professional career. It's a journey that's fueled by advising, caring, sharing and encouragement. I feel so fortunate to work with the amazing mentors, colleagues and students. Especially, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my closest collaborator in recent years, John Seinfeld of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for his guidance and support. I benefited enormously from his vision in atmospheric sciences, highest standard in research and personality of a great scientist. My special thanks also go to Yuk Yung of Caltech, whose wisdom and guidance illuminated my path and helped me find strength during the lowest point of my career. My heartfelt gratitude and appreciation are extended to all my previous mentors and coworkers (too many to be named here) at Texas A&M University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, Purdue and now Stanford. I feel blessed to work at those top-notch institutes that all provided energizing and nurturing environments for me. Finally, I want to share this moment with my wife, Yixun Zhang, who has unconditionally supported my academic pursuits; my parents; two wonderful daughters; and all family members. Thank you all for being a part of my adventure and endeavors.The global warming and air pollution challenges facing humankind in the 21st century underscore the vital importance of geosciences. This honor will keep motivating and reminding me of the responsibilities and obligations I shall carry to deepen our understanding of the global environmental and climate crises, to educate next-generation scientists, and to communicate my scientific findings for the achievement of sustainability for our planet, Earth.Thank you. - Yuan Wang, Stanford University, Stanford, California

Yuan Wang will receive the 2016 James R. Holton Junior Scientist Award at the 2016 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 12–16 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “outstanding research contributions by a junior atmospheric scientist within three years of his or her Ph.D.”  

“For groundbreaking research advancing the understanding of the impact of aerosols on a variety of convective, mesoscale, and weather scale atmospheric phenomena”

Dr. Wang’s main research involved modeling the aerosol effects on clouds and precipitation using the mesoscale cloud-resolving model and global climate models. Noticeably, he implemented an explicit two-moment bulk cloud microphysical scheme in the WRF model and developed a hierarchical modeling approach by upscaling the regional aerosol forcing to the global climate simulations. His work has led to breakthrough findings in enhancing the understanding of several key atmospheric topics, including the changes in precipitation extremes due to different anthropogenic forcings, intensification of North Pacific storm by Asian aerosol outflow with possible downstream effects over the U.S. west coast, and modulation of hurricane intensity by aerosols. In just 3 years after his Ph.D., he has already accrued an outstanding research record of 22 refereed publications (10 as first author), many of them in high-impact journals such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Geophysical Research Letters.
Yuan is very active in serving the community by chairing and co-chairing sessions in major conferences, providing extensive service as a reviewer. He received numerous awards, including the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS) Early Career Scientist Medal (2015) and the AGU Editor’s Citation Award for Excellence in Scientific Refereeing (2013).

A statement in his supporting letter best summarizes Dr. Wang’s research talents: “Yuan has the rare combination of the ability to analyze complex climate dataset for extracting aerosol signals in a clear and concise way, and in parallel develop microphysical scheme for WRF that is capable of simulating the observed effects, as well as replicate the observations with the simulations.”

On behalf of the AGU Atmospheric Sciences section, I am pleased to present the 2016 James R. Holton Award to Dr. Yuan Wang.
—William K. M. Lau, President, Atmospheric Sciences section, AGU

Thank you, Dr. Lau and the AGU Atmospheric Sciences section awards committee. I am truly honored and humbled to be selected as the recipient of the 2016 James R. Holton Award. Having conducted atmospheric research for the past 9 years, I am very fortunate and blessed to have had the opportunity to interact with many excellent mentors, colleagues, and collaborators in the field. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my Ph.D. advisor, Prof. Renyi Zhang for his guidance and support, with whom I benefited enormously from his vision in atmospheric sciences and high standard in mentoring students. My special thanks also go to Jonathan Jiang, for providing me the platform and freedom of pursuing my postdoctoral research; to Zhanqing Li, Yuk Yung, Danny Rosenfeld, Jerry North, and Ruby Leung, for constantly encouraging me to achieve a higher level and supporting me in different ways; to Jiwen Fan, Hui Su, and others, for the tremendous help and inspiration in sharpening my research skills. My heartfelt gratitude and appreciation are extended to everyone I worked with at Texas A&M University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The first 3 years after Ph.D. graduation is arguably the most challenging period in the career of a scientist, and I sincerely thank the AGU Atmospheric Sciences section for the establishment of this priceless award for junior atmospheric scientists named after the late Prof. James R. Holton. I certainly wish to live up to the expectations and inspiration of this award in my future professional life. —Yuan Wang, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena