Student Symposium
ESOM 2026, the Earth System Observation and Modeling graduate student symposium, brought students from across Virginia and Maryland to George Mason University this month. Participants came from Hampton U, Johns Hopkins U, U Maryland Baltimore county, U Maryland College Park, University of Virginia and George Mason.
Talks and posters examined atmospheric dynamics, climate dynamics, air quality, climate education, climate change impacts, and physical oceanography. Techniques of machine learning played a large role in many of the research projects presented by students.
Keynote addresses were given by Milt Halem (UMBC) and Chaowei Yang (GMU). Dr. Halem, winner of the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and other awards, pioneered using computers for Earth and Space Science, including data assimilation. Dr Yang is the Founding Director of the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center and is a leader in using high-performance computing to analyze environmental systems.
A career panel offered students a chance to ask questions of NASA scientist Abdullah Fahad (a graduate of Mason’s Climate Dynamics program) and oceanographer Stelios Flampouris of Silurian AI, who has worked in both the public and private sectors.
The symposium was largely planned and run by a committee consisting of Mason Climate graduate students Aahelee Sarker, Austin Reed, Po Ju Chen, Katherine Barragan, Tahmidul Azom Sany, and Jaedyn Williams.
