Atmospheric Sciences Graduate Student Receives NASA Fellowship

Jun 18, 2015

Souichro Hioki is the only Texas A&M graduate student to be awarded competitive fellowship. 

The NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program (NESSF) has selected Souichro Hioki to receive a one-year competitive fellowship under one of four research programs of the Science Mission Directorate.

Hioki’s fellowship was awarded by the Earth Science Program. His research topic is “Variability of Ice Cloud Particle Roughness Determined from Polarimetric Satellite Observations.” He is the only graduate student at Texas A&M to be designated to receive an NESSF Fellowship. The $30,000 fellowships are for one year, and are renewable for two more years if satisfactory progress is made. NASA received 712 applications, including 391 for the Earth Science division, of which 64 were selected. 

A graduate of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, Hioki is studying under Ping Yang, professor and department head of Atmospheric Sciences. Hioki received the Best Student Poster Presentation Award at the American Meteorological Society Meeting’s conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography in January. He also received the outstanding graduate student seminar departmental award in December 2014. Hioki is currently a research assistant in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. His research interests are radiative transfer of polarized light in the atmosphere and atmospheric optics and bioaerosols.

“The project proposed by Mr. Hioki for a NESSF fellowship is to quantify the degree of the surface roughness of ice crystals within ice clouds,” Yang said. “In the literature, it has been demonstrated that ice crystal surface roughness has important implications from remote sensing and radiation budget perspectives. In my opinion, the project that Hioki proposed is in the frontier of research with a potentially significant impact on remote sensing of ice cloud properties.  

By Karen Riedel [embed: kriedel@tamu.edu