University of Colorado at Boulder Geography Professor Roger Barry was named distinguished professor by the CU Board of Regents at its March 4 meeting.
Barry, who is director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, headquartered at CU-Boulder, joins only 19 other CU-Boulder faculty members who currently hold the title of distinguished professor. He also is a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, which oversees NSIDC.
The designation of distinguished professor is bestowed on members of the university faculty "who have distinguished themselves as exemplary teachers, scholars and public servants and who are individuals having extraordinary international importance and recognition."
Barry is recognized internationally as one of the top geographers and polar climatologists. His research in cryospheric science and climate has provided leadership for NSIDC/WDCG since 1982.
"During his career, Roger Barry has been instrumental in establishing several initiatives in the hydrological and atmospheric sciences at national and international levels," said Konrad Steffen, deputy director of CIRES and a long-time Arctic researcher. "He is one of the most respected Arctic geographers in the United States and worldwide."
Barry also has pioneered research in weather pattern analysis, global climate modeling, ice-age climates and more recently on the impacts of, and changes in, mountain climates and arctic environments. His work is considered fundamental to much of the recent debate over the impact and mechanisms of global climate change.
He has published 18 books, 210 journal articles and book chapters and has one of the highest paper citation index scores worldwide in the fields of climatology and physical geography. Barry has supervised 32 doctoral dissertations and 23 master's theses by CU-Boulder students, many of whom have gone on to become leaders in environmental sciences.
"Professor Barry exemplifies all the best qualities of a premier-teacher-scholar," said CU-Boulder Chancellor Richard Byyny. "His cutting-edge environmental research, coupled with his outstanding teaching skills, clearly illustrate his continuing drive for excellence."
Fluent in French, Russian and German, Barry has been a visiting professor at nine prestigious universities overseas. His contributions to climatology have been recognized through a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship award and lifetime achievement awards by the Association of American Geographers for Climate in 2001 and for Mountain Geography in 2002.
In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. The AGU Fellow award is made to no more than 0.1 percent of the 41,000 members worldwide. Other major awards include being elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in 2001 and his appointment as a Fulbright Teaching Scholar in Moscow in 2001.
Barry received a bachelor's degree with honors from the University of Liverpool in England in 1957, a master's degree from McGill University in Montreal in 1959 and a doctorate from the University of Southampton in England in 1965.
Headquartered at CU-Boulder, CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For a scanned image of Barry on the web, call Jim Scott or Jeannine Malmsbury in the CU-Boulder News Office at (303) 492-6431.