Grubišić Vanda
Membership in the Academy:
- corresponding member – Department of Natural Sciences
Vanda Grubišić was born in Slavonski Brod in 1964 and is one of the world’s leading scientists in the field of mesoscale meteorology. She graduated in geophysics from the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, and received her master’s and doctorate from Yale University, USA. She did her postdoctoral internship at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. After that, she was a visiting scholar at the same institution, assistant professor and associate professor at the University of the State of Nevada, USA, and a full professor at the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna, Austria. Today, she is assistant director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and director of the Earth Observation Laboratory at the institution. She is also a visiting professor at the University of Zagreb. As a mentor in different institutions, she led four undergraduate students, eleven postgraduate students and two postdoctoral researchers.
So far, Vanda Grubišić has published 59 scientific articles and more than 180 conference papers, including a large number of invited papers. Many of her scientific articles have been published in top international journals.
According to the Scopus database, her papers have so far been cited more than 1,600 times with an h-index of 22. Vanda Grubišić’s research work took place within the framework of fifteen mostly American projects on which she was for the most part a leader or co-director. In the period 2003-2009 she led two projects dedicated to the exploration of atmospheric rotors in the Sierra Nevada area, in which one of the most successful American experiments dedicated to the exploration of air motion over mountains (T-REX) was carried out. The focus of her interest is on mesoscale atmospheric dynamics, especially on air flow and precipitation processes in conditions of complex orography, often combining an experimental approach with the results of analytical and numerical modeling. For example, she investigated the formation of the rotor, the turbulence associated with such an atmospheric phenomenon, as well as the vertical motion of air that occurs in the process. She also explored the atmospheric grooves behind the island (Madeira, St. Vincent, Hawaii).
She maintained interest in atmospheric processes in Croatia, especially the bora, so she published the results of the first plane measurements that documented the variability of the bora along our coast as well as a number of other articles in which the bora field and the related turbulent processes were investigated. After all, she never lost sight of the history of the profession, so she participated in a study that pointed to the pioneering contribution that Andrija Mohorovičić made to the research of atmospheric rotors.
She has participated in the work of twenty advisory bodies, commissions and boards of directors as well as in the organization of fifteen scientific congresses. She is a member of the editorial boards of the journal Atmosphere and Geophysics, has reviewed for fifteen international journals and for some of the most respected scientific agencies.
She received a number of awards, in 2013 she became a regular member of the American Meteorological Society, and in 2015 she received the Spiridion Brusina Medal of the Croatian Natural History Society.
She was elected as a correspondent member of the Hazu in 2018.