Sally A. McFarlane '97

Mary Lyon Award

February 9, 2009

The Alumnae Association is pleased to honor Sally A. McFarlane, class of 1997, with the Mary Lyon Award. This award honors a young alumna who graduated no more than fifteen years ago and who has demonstrated sustained achievement in her life and career consistent with the humane values that Mary Lyon exemplified in her life and inspired in others.

Sally, after graduating summa cum laude with your degree in physics and mathematics from Mount Holyoke, you went on to graduate school at the University of Colorado, where you earned a doctoral degree in astrophysical, planetary, and atmospheric sciences in 2002. You became a scientist in climate physics at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where you performed theoretical radiative transfer closure studies of clouds in the tropics and aerosols in sub-Saharan Africa. From these studies, you developed new methods to retrieve liquid cloud properties from millimeter wave radar and microwave radiometer measurements, and to determine ice crystal shape from multi-angular satellite measurements.

You currently lead several projects for the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program and for the NASA Energy and Water Cycle Study. Using ground-based and satellite remote sensing observations, combined with model simulations, you investigate how vertical structure in tropical clouds affects the radiation budget. NASA recently honored you with a New Investigator Program Award in recognition of your research, documented by a rapidly growing list of publications in atmospheric science, meteorology, and geophysics.

Sally, in your young career, you have already published twelve scientific papers—seven on which you were the lead author—in leading peer-reviewed journals. In 2007, you published two first- and four co-authored publications. This number is outstanding for a young scientist and, in fact, amounts to the most publications of any of the eighteen other accomplished scientists of the climate physics group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Among your colleagues you are well-recognized not only for your achievements in the field but also for what the associate director of your division calls your “enormous potential” in making an impact on climate research in the long and extremely promising career ahead of you.

In recognition of your exceptional early achievements, and in anticipation of your continued success and outstanding community service, the Alumnae Association presents you with the Mary Lyon Award.

Mary Graham Davis ’65
President Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College

Jane E. Zachary
Executive Director Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College