DAES Professor Helps Students Leap to Scientists

DAES Professor Paul Roundy stands next to NASA headquarters at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

ALBANY, N.Y. (April 21, 2020) – A quick review of Paul Roundy’s Google Scholar profile will show you thousands of citations in peer-reviewed academic journals that are advancing the world’s atmospheric and climate research.

What the numbers will not show you is how he is preparing UAlbany’s next generation of scientists.

Roundy, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES), has spent more than a decade at the University, conducting research in tropical meteorology while also teaching students how to write and publish their own academic papers.

His courses, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, have a common theme – simulating the academic publishing process. Students are tasked with using publically-available datasets to research a topic that relates to the class. They then observe the data for trends and other significant findings, write a paper and submit it before the end of the semester.

Roundy acts as a journal editor to mirror the publishing process: accepting the student paper as is, offering revisions or rejecting it. The rest of the class serves as peer reviewers.

“I think it has become expected now, at least in my field, for student researchers to have published work during graduate school,” Roundy said. "My goal is to teach them how to present a simple argument. What stands out statistically or is physically significant in their findings? Is there something here of high-impact that helps us understand how nature works? Going through this critical thinking process is just as important as conducting the research itself.”

Publishing Student Research

DAES graduate students Heather Sussman (left) and Ajay Raghavendra.

Roundy’s class projects have led to a number of published papers featuring original student research – a rarity in most academic journals. Included are two from projects last semester, led by DAES students Ajay Raghavendra and Heather Sussman.

Raghavendra’s paper, featured in the Journal of Climate, examines trends in tropical wave activity from the 1980s to 2016; Sussman’s paper, featured in Climate Dynamics, examines historical and simulated future trends in northern midlatitude atmospheric wave power from 1950 to 2099.

The two graduate students also received media attention last October after collaborating with DAES associate professor Liming Zhou on published research that explored connections between a changing climate and increased urbanization in Bengaluru, India.

"Taking ATM 561 with Prof. Roundy was an invaluable experience for me as a first-year graduate student,” Sussman said. “The class itself enhanced my research skills that I will use throughout my career. Additionally, Dr. Roundy's guidance and support allowed me to develop a creative mindset in thinking about ways to address my research questions in the future.”

"The unconstrained teaching style of Prof. Paul Roundy, along with his flexible open-door office policy, allows students to apply the skills they learn in the classroom to meaningful research problems which are usually part of their MS or PhD thesis,” Raghavendra added. “There is a significant enhancement of research productivity in this teaching style, which paves the way for first-author peer-reviewed student publications in high-quality journals."

You can learn about Roundy’s own expertise here. Also visit his personal faculty website for more detailed information.

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