University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL
Dr. Kelvin K. Droegemeier
Professor, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Science and Policy
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1301 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801
Mail Code: MC-104
Dr. Kelvin K. Droegemeier is Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Science and Policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He previously spent 38 years at the University of Oklahoma, where he held the positions of Regents’ Professor of Meteorology, Weathernews Chair, and Teigen Presidential Professor. From 2009 to 2018, he served as Vice President for Research. Droegemeier earned a B.S. with Special Distinction in Meteorology in 1980 from the University of Oklahoma, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in atmospheric science in 1982 and 1985, respectively, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined the University of Oklahoma in September, 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Meteorology, and was co-founder in 1989 of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center (STC) for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS), serving for five years as its deputy director. He then directed CAPS from 1994 until 2006, and today CAPS is recognized around the world as the pioneer of storm-scale numerical weather prediction. In 2003, Dr. Droegemeier co-founded the NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) and served for several years as its deputy director. From 1999-2001, he wrote a daily weather science column for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper, which is Oklahoma's largest.
Dr. Droegemeier has served the science and engineering research and education communities at the national level for nearly 40 years. From 2019 to 2021, Dr. Droegemeier served as Director of The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Science Advisor to the President. In these roles he coordinated planning, prioritization, and policymaking for more than two dozen Federal agencies which conduct or support research and development with combined budgets of more than $130 billion. He created the first ever Assistant Director for Academic Engagement at OSTP, established the Joint Committee on the Research Environment (JCORE) as chair of the National Science and Technology Council (which includes the important Subcommittee on Research Security), and for two and a half months served as Acting Director of the National Science Foundation. As Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Dr. Droegemeier established the Student, Post-Doctoral and Early Career (SPEC) committee to ensure that perspectives from next-generation scholars and entrepreneurs were incorporated in the development of science and technology policy.
Nominated in 2003 by President George W. Bush and confirmed in 2004 by the US Senate, he served a six-year term on the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation that also provides science policy guidance to the Congress and President. Dr. Droegemeier was re-nominated by President Obama and again confirmed by the Senate, serving a second six-year term on the National Science Board, the last four years as Vice-Chairman. On the National Science Board, he chaired a number of key committees and led or participated in task forces on cost sharing, administrative research regulations, transformative research, and hurricane research. He has testified before the United States House and Senate on 13 occasions on topics ranging from U.S. global leadership in science and technology to STEM education.
Dr. Droegemeier served as Chair of the Association of Public and Land Grant University’s (APLU) Council on Research Policy and Graduate Education (CRPGE), now the Council on Research (CoR). He is a former Trustee and Chairman of the Board of Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) and former Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which operates the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on behalf of the NSF. He also served a member of the Board of Directors of Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Foundation, and the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR). Dr. Droegemeier is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America and served on the Council on Competitiveness Technology Leadership and Strategy Initiative (TLSI).
Dr. Droegemeier is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He chaired the Weather and Climate Team for Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry’s EDGE (Economic Development Generating Excellence) Program and was appointed in 2017 by Governor Mary Fallin as Oklahoma’s fourth Cabinet Secretary of Science and Technology, having previously served on Governor Fallin’s Science and Technology Council, chairing the Sub-Committee on Academic Research and Development. He also was a member of the Oklahoma EPSCoR State Committee and led the creation of the State EPSCoR Strategic Plan. In 2014, Dr. Droegemeier organized an informal coalition of some 30 vice presidents and vice chancellors of research from universities 12 states in the central and southern Plains to work collaboratively on problems ranging from food production and energy to water quality and availability.
Dr. Droegemeier is a national leader in the creation of partnerships among academia, government and industry. He initiated and led a 3-year, $1M partnership with American Airlines to customize weather prediction technology for commercial aviation, and this resulted in him co-founding a private company, Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. (now part of DTN), located in Norman, that is commercializing advanced weather technology developed by the University of Oklahoma and other organizations. He led a $10.6M research alliance with Williams Energy Marketing and Trading Company in Tulsa, which is the largest such partnership between a university and a private company in the field of meteorology. Dr. Droegemeier’s research interests lie in thunderstorm dynamics and predictability, variational data assimilation, mesoscale dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, massively parallel computing, and aviation weather. He has served as a consultant to Honeywell Corporation, American Airlines, the National Transportation Safety Board, and Climatological Consulting Corp, and has testified numerous times as an expert witness in commercial airline accidents. In his nearly 40 years at the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Droegemeier has generated over $40 million in external research funding, authoring or co-authoring more than 80 refereed journal articles and over 200 conference publications.
Dr. Droegemeier has authored a new book, titled Demystifying the Academic Research Enterprise, which will be published open access and thus available free of charge by MIT Press in December, 2023. This unique educational resource teaches next-generation researchers—across all disciplines and types of institutions—about the vast array of topics one needs to master in order to be successful, in addition to the formal expertise required in a given discipline or disciplines.
[IN-PERSON/LIVESTREAMED] Plenary Session: Demystifying the Research Enterprise
Monday, December 4, 2023
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM ET
C26 - [IN-PERSON ONLY] The Role of Institutional Leadership in Public Policy
Monday, December 4, 2023
3:45 PM – 4:45 PM ET