Associate Director, CICOES-UAF

Dr. Uma Bhatt is an Associate Director for CICOES at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She directed the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Alaska Research (CIFAR) between 2015 and 2020 and has been a professor at UAF since 1998. Her research primarily focuses on climate variability and change.

Dr. Bhatt earned a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering as well as a B.A. in Russian from the University of Pittsburgh. Her interest in solar technology and sustainable energy research drew her to the field of engineering, but her path changed when she and her husband decided to join the Peace Corps for two years after her undergraduate studies.

“I served in East Africa for two years in the Peace Corps during ‘83 to ’85, when it basically didn’t rain for two years in Kenya. And the impact on humans was very clear, because in Kenya, you have to pay to go to high school. Most of our students were from farming families and they just didn’t have the money to pay their school . . . the human toll was very, very evident,” said Bhatt. Though sustainability had always been of interest to her, seeing the impact that climate could have on communities firsthand helped her realize what she truly wanted out of her research. “What drove me into this field was doing something that was actionable science.”

Dr. Bhatt’s time in the Peace Corps also inspired her to switch gears when it came time to return to graduate school. “Kenya has the most amazing atmospheric phenomena – like huge cumulus convection, and rainbows, and we were at 9000 feet where there was hail. So I just became so enamored with the idea of meteorology,” said Bhatt. She would go on to chase that interest and earn both her M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

During her subsequent multi-decadal career at UAF, Dr. Bhatt has worked on a variety of research projects concerning climate variability in the Arctic. These days, among other projects, she is the lead for the Sea Ice Prediction Network, which consolidates user-contributed sea ice minimum forecasts and investigates the sensitivity of sea ice predictability to a warming ocean, among other things. She is also very excited to be working on seasonal fire weather forecasting in Alaska. “It gives fire managers one other piece of information when they’re making decisions in March . . . They decide what’s going to happen in logistics – like, ‘do we need to order some more people from the lower 48?’ They want to know if it’s going to be a really bad year or not such a bad year,” said Bhatt.

Dr. Bhatt emphasized the value of working on interdisciplinary teams to solve the complicated problems she tackles in her research. “I think one of my goals in the last few years of my career as I get closer to retirement is really to think about how to help the next generation navigate what is changing, because you have to have this balance between looking out for yourself and working in a team, you know, how do you balance that? I think [CICOES] is actually a really good active exercise in how we do that,” said Bhatt. “It’s very important to think about what your strengths and weaknesses are, think about where you see yourself fitting in. In this multidisciplinary activity, for it to work, everybody needs to see where they fit in and where they contribute, so it is really important to have some deep expertise.” Her additional advice to current students: “Learn as many computer skills as possible. Reflect on things. Don’t beat yourself up but reflect. We beat ourselves up way too much and it’s just not positive or you know that’s not getting you farther. Find older mentors — it’s good to have a trusted person or multiple people that you can go to for advice, and asking for help is OK.”