It is a great honor and privilege to be a candidate for the AMS President. With its goals at the nexus of science and policy in service of society, AMS is poised to make major headway on the grand challenge of our times, the future thrivability of life on our planet. As your President, I would work with the AMS leadership, the Council, as well our Committees members, to prioritize and tackle remaining bottlenecks in understanding of weather and climate and their applications to real world problems. As climate and Earth System changes exacerbate extreme events, the clarion call to the AMS community has never been stronger. How can we manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable? I am committed to ensuring that we answer this call in innovative ways that we identify together.
As President, I would strive to ensure that the AMS remains agile and open to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge, and the development of its application to relevant sectors building on existing and/or new foundations and networks. I would engender broad engagement across all of AMS members and its partners to pursue goals that bridge basic and applied research to critical services, be they for farmers, firefighters and other emergency responders, global health practitioners, operators of our electrical grid, Wall Street and/or Main Street.
Members are the greatest asset of our Society. We need to overcome obstacles that hinder fuller participation of individuals and institutions who are underserved and underrepresented in the enterprise. Building on lessons learnt, we need to emerge from the disruptions of the global pandemic to become a welcoming and diverse AMS. Only in that way can we hope to strengthen partnerships between the academic, public and private sectors and to fully leverage regional, national, and international cooperation to accomplish our goals.
Anjuli S. Bamzai currently serves as Senior Science Advisor, Global Climate Change in the Directorate for Geosciences, National Science Foundation (NSF). In this role she represents NSF at various leadership positions in interagency Working Groups e.g., U. S. Global Change Research Program, Interagency Arctic Policy Research Committee, Climate Security Advisory Council, U.S. Climate Variability and Predictability program, as well as ad hoc Working Groups convened by the Office of Science and Technology Policy e.g. Fast-track Action Committee on Earth System Predictability.
At NSF, she has served as Division Director, Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, Section Head Atmosphere Section, program director Arctic Natural Sciences and program director Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics. She has worked as a program manager at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Atmospheric and Oceanic Research, Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and NSF. She has highlighted the role of science diplomacy through an Embassy Science Fellowship at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul Republic of Korea, and will be doing a stint as Embassy Science Fellow at the Embassy in Cairo Egypt this summer.
She has served as the US Government reviewer for the IPCC AR4 and was the NSF ex-officio member on the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee for the third National Climate Assessment. She was program manager for the International Research Institute, Columbia University during its formative period.
Bamzai earned a Ph.D. in Earth Systems and Global Changes from George Mason University (1997). The training she received in India includes the following: Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay India (1979); Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay India (1973); and Bachelor of Science degrees in Physics (major), Mathematics and Statistics from Fergusson College, Pune India (1971).