MTU Board of Control member Dr. Ruth A. Reck left the Argonne National Laboratory on January 5 to accept a dual appointment as director of the National Institute for Global Environmental Change (NIGEC) and professor at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Reck is the former director of Argonne's global climate change programs and was serving a two-year term as the Laboratory's Women in Science Program Initiator. She was on the research staff of Argonne's Environmental Research Division.
With regional centers at six universities (Alabama, UC Davis, Harvard, Indiana, Nebraska, and Tulane), NIGEC is supported through the Department of Energy's Office of Biology and Environmental Research. The organization's mission is to help DOE answer questions related to climate change.
The NIGEC mission is addressed by a national monitoring program that makes direct measurements of carbon dioxide flux and environmental conditions and conducts modeling, ecology, and physiology studies to learn how the terrestrial biosphere acts as a sink for carbon dioxide. Another program on integrated ecological effects and integrated assessment involves model validation and intercomparisons to identify (1) the feedbacks that constrain the regional effects of climate change, (2) the influence on carbon cycling of changes in productivity and land use, and (3) the effects of extreme weather conditions versus mean values.