Polvani Receives NSF's National Young Investigator Award

Columbia University Record
Vol. 20, No. 13

Prof. Lorenzo Polvani was one of seven Columbia faculty members to receive a National Science Foundation's National Young Investigator (NYI) Award in 1994. The number ranked Columbia second in the nation and first in the Ivy League.

Polvani studies the fluid dynamics of Earth's atmosphere and that of other major planets in the solar system. He has used mathematical models to understand the Polar Night Vortex, an intense jet-like flow of air that develops in the polar region of the winter stratosphere and is closely associated with ozone depletion.

Polvani has also developed theories that explain Neptune's great dark spot, Saturn's ribbon wave and other vortices in planetary atmospheres. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. in physics from McGill University and the Ph.D. from the joint MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution program in physical oceanography.

He joined the Columbia faculty in 1990.