The Distinguished Achievement Award recognizes distinct and extraordinary accomplishments with identifiable impacts that have provided a significant advance in enabling, understanding, or communicating key scientific issues during the past five-year period. The work should represent the very best of accomplishments that enhance UCAR's reputation by having a significant external impact.
Description of Work
UCAR is honored to award the 2024 Distinguished Achievement Award to Bette Otto-Bliesner for her pioneering work in modeling Earth's past climates, her exceptional leadership, and her dedication to mentoring the next generation of scientists.
Throughout her career, Dr. Otto-Bliesner has both established the foundations for and pushed the boundaries of her field of paleoclimatology. As noted in her nomination, “Her work not only refines our understanding of past climate dynamics but also informs broader discussions about climate change mechanisms and their impacts.” She has provided profound insights in the areas of deglaciation dynamics, the climate-CO2 relationship, changes in hydrology, and abrupt climate changes.
Dr. Otto-Bliesner has consistently worked to bridge gaps between specializations, fostering collaboration between the quaternary science community and the climate modeling community and between paleo and future climate researchers.
Some of the most tangible evidence of her impact is that 12 of her postdoctoral mentees hold positions as professors or scientists at major universities and research institutes. One mentee shared that after helping to launch their career with letters of recommendation, introductions, help with models and even flights to conferences, now Dr. Otto-Bliesner continues by helping her mentee’s graduate students with opportunities.
Dr. Otto-Bliesner’s accolades include being a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 as an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Lead Author, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). She received the AGU’s Cesare Emiliani Lecture award in 2016 and the European Geosciences Union’s Milutin Milankovic Medal in 2023, and to these and many other honors it is fitting that we add one more and welcome her to the select group who have received a UCAR Distinguished Achievement Award.