Atmospheric Sciences Researcher Receives International Award

Jul 9, 2015

A promising young researcher receives recognition for early-career contributions to atmospheric sciences research.

Dr. Lei Bi, assistant research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, has received the Richard Goody Award for outstanding work in atmospheric radiation and remote sensing. Winners of the competitive award, given by Elsevier and the Journal Of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, were announced during the 15th Electromagnetic and Light Scattering Conference in Leipzig, Germany, held June 21–26. In addition to recognition in the journal, the prize also included a cash award and certificate. 

The early-career award honors its namesake Dr. Richard Goody for his pioneering research and long-lasting impact on the disciplines of atmospheric radiation, remote sensing and climate change. Dr. Goody is emeritus professor of planetary physics at Harvard and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Bi, whose undergraduate degrees are in physics from Anhui Normal and Beijing Normal universities in China, holds a doctorate in physics from Texas A&M University. He is a member of Dr. Ping Yang’s research team. Dr. Bi has published 25 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious international journals

Dr. Bi investigates the interaction of electromagnetic waves with particulate matter and their relevant applications in atmospheric radiative transfer and remote sensing.

“Dr. Bi’s collaboration with me and with several colleagues, including George Kattawar and Michael Mishchenko, led to an innovative implementation of the invariant imbedding T-matrix (II-TM) method that was pioneered by Johnson (1988) in the case of axially symmetric particles,” said Dr. Ping Yang, professor and department head in Atmospheric Sciences. 

Dr. Yang explained further that “this innovative implementation has been extended to arbitrary morphologies and inhomogeneous compositions. Moreover, Dr. Bi has made important contributions to light scattering theory by accounting for semi-classical scattering effects to bridge the solutions from Maxwell’s equations for small-to-moderate particle sizes and semi-empirical physical geometrical solutions for large non-spherical particles.”

“His outstanding record of research achievements is rare among his cohorts at the same career stage,” said Dr. Yang.