Women studying in one of the most rigorous, prestigious Atmospheric Science departments in the country approached Maria Silva Dias with tears in their eyes.
She is the reason they are here, they told her in April at the ceremony awarding a doctoral student with the first Silva Dias Award.
In 1979, Silva Dias was the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. from the department. She helped create the Department of Meteorology at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, and is now retired. This past spring, she was in Fort Collins to learn the name of the recipient of the first award in her honor.
Ph.D. students led a campaign to name the award after Silva Dias. The award honors a senior Ph.D. candidate for outstanding research. Those interested in helping to build the scholarship fund can contribute at Colorado State University.
This year’s recipient, Ryan Patnaude, studied sea spray chemistry in cirrus cloud formation using a powerful combination of theory, laboratory and field observations. He worked with Russell Perkins at the time; he’s now a post-doctoral researcher working with University Distinguished Professor Sonia Kreidenweis.
“I’m very honored,” Silva Dias told the packed room last spring. “I’ve been a professor most of my life, and I really believe in the mission of graduate work. Thank you, CSU, for being instrumental in my career.”
A role model for rising stars
In high school, Silva Dias knew she liked math and physics, and upon going to college in Brazil, she saw a poster for an internship for undergraduate students in meteorology. She was honored by the department in 2017 as the Outstanding Alum.
At the ceremony, Sue van den Heever, now a University Distinguished Professor at CSU, said she looked up to Silva Dias when she was studying to get her Ph.D. in the 1990s.
“Maria, you’ve been a tremendous inspiration in all you have achieved,” said van den Heever, now principal investigator on INCUS, and the first woman to lead a NASA Earth venture mission.
Of CSU, Silva Dias later said, “They really lived teaching and researching and they involved the students in workshops, and things like that. When we built the department in Brazil, our model was CSU. It developed into one of the best in Latin America.”
She was moved by the ceremony, and the women who approached her to thank her.
“I’ve become a role model for women,” she said after the ceremony. “I go just to show young women that a career as a scientist is something they can do. I am 70 now, so I don’t intend to do much research, so I’m doing consulting.
“I have to keep showing the way.”
Riehl Memorial Award
Also awarded was the Riehl Memorial Award to a rising master’s or Ph.D. candidate in their first year. This year’s recipients were Gabrielle “Bee” Leung, who studies how aerosol breezes drive cloud and precipitation increases, and Kyle Shackelford, who studies the role of rain layers in modifying the ocean surface later and generating convention in the context of the Madden-Julian Oscillation. Leung works with van den Heever; Shackelford’s advisors are Professor Peter Jan van Leeuwen and research scientist Charlotte DeMott.
The Riehl award is named after the department’s founder, Herbert Riehl.
