Narrative:
Molly is a unique constellation of attributes. Her educational, professional, and extracurricular background spans the arts, health sciences, and physical sciences. Because of this, she has the ability to see connections across disciplines and respects all disciplines.
She focused her Bachelor's degree at Linfield College on the universal language of mathematics and its applications. Postbaccalaureate, she followed her innate curiosity and love of meteorology to a graduate program at UC Boulder where she specialized in the areas of atmospheric dynamics, remote sensing, and Arctic climatology.
To Molly, the best classroom is the out of doors. Being a NOLS graduate, it was no surprise that she sought out field research in extreme environments. She ultimately landed on the Greenland ice sheet where she performed maintenance on automated weather stations in the Greenland Climate Network.
The most rewarding experience of both her academic career and post-academic career has been communicating new ideas and knowledge to a diverse audience including fellow scientists, administrators, and the general public. For over a decade at the National Snow & Ice Data Center, Molly acted as a central interface to the cryospheric and climate data user community by assisting users (~40,000) in finding the right data and information for their needs.
During her tenure, she was Chairman/Co-Chairman of the NASA EOSDIS User Services Working Group. She facilitated the collaboration between 12 NASA data centers advocating for user needs and interests, leading to the creation of instructional materials and online portals for climate data product information and education. She was also an end user representative on multiple NASA satellite mission and science teams.
Molly recently made a subject matter phase change from frozen water to liquid water and now supports the WRF-Hydro team in building a user community around their modeling system here at NCAR.
