Dave Easterling, an AMS Member, and a Fellow of the AMS, is Chief of the Global Climate Applications Division at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carilina. Dr. Easterling has a PhD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1987) and from 1987 to 1990 he was an Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1990 he moved to the National Climatic Data Center as a research scientist. He was appointed Principal Scientist in 1999, and Chief of the Global Climate Applications Division in 2002. Dr. Easterling has authored or co-authored more than eighty research articles on climate science in journals such as Science, Nature and the Journal of Climate. He was a Lead Author for the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, a Convening Lead Author for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 3.3 on Climate Extremes, and was a Contributing Author to the IPCC Second and Third Assessment Reports. He is currently a Lead Author on the IPCC Special Report on Climate Extremes and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Dr. Easterling's research interests include the detection of climate change in the observed record, particularly changes in extreme climate events and the assessment of climate model simulations for changes in extreme climate events.