Biography

Dr. R. Saravanan is currently a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University, College Station. Prior to that, he worked as a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. His research interests include the predictability of climate on seasonal to millennial timescales, and large-scale flow patterns in the atmosphere and the oceans. He has taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level, on the topics of atmospheric science, climatology, geophysical fluid dynamics, statistical methods, and computer programming. He is the author of the book The Climate Demon: Past, Present, and Future of Climate Prediction, and helped create the TED Ed animated lesson Is the weather actually becoming more extreme?

Dr. Saravanan also has a keen interest in the innovative use of computers in scientific research and more recently, in classroom teaching. His most recent project in this area is Slidoc (https://github.com/mitotic/slidoc), a web app framework for classroom and group interaction. His other computing projects include GraphTerm (https://github.com/mitotic/graphterm), a "graphical terminal interface", otrace (https://github.com/mitotic/otrace), an object-oriented python debugger, Enigmail (https://enigmail.net), a popular open-source add-on for email encryption in Thunderbird, and the Hyperslab Operator Suite (HOPS) for analyzing climate model data.

Dr. Saravanan received his Master of Science in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1986, and his Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from Princeton University in 1990. Following that, he carried out post-doctoral research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.