Dr. James Mcwilliams

Biography

James McWilliams is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA. He received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Caltech with honors in 1968, followed by an M.S. in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 1971 from Harvard. He held a Research Fellowship in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at Harvard from 1971 to 1974 and subsequently worked at the Oceanography Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), becoming Senior Scientist in 1980. In 1994, he became the Louis B. Slichter Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA while maintaining a part-time appointment at NCAR. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. His research interests primarily focus on fluid dynamics of the Earth's oceans and atmosphere, including theory and computational modeling. Notable areas of study include climate dynamics, vortex dynamics, computational models of coastal ocean processes, and interactions between physical oceanography and biogeochemistry. McWilliams has significantly contributed to three-dimensional simulation models for the California Current System, examining historical variability and future possibilities related to oceanic phenomena.

Research Interests