DR. REID A. BRYSON

Dr. Reid A. Bryson joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1946, at the end of his military service as a Major in the Air Weather Service.

His first appointment was in the Department of Geology and in the Department of Geography. In 1948 he started the Department of Meteorology, which is now one of the largest and most prestigious in the United States.

In 1963, he founded the Center for Climatic Research, in which he is currently Senior Scientist. Throughout his career, Dr. Bryson has been interested in interdisciplinary studies and was one of the founders and chairman of the University of Wisconsin’s Interdisciplinary Committee on the Future of Man.

He also served for 15 years as the founding Director of the renowned University of Wisconsin Institute for Environmental Studies. Considered by many to be the ‘Father of Scientific Climatology’, Professor Bryson has written five books and more than 240 papers in the fields of limnology, meteorology, climatology, archaeology and geography.

Much of Bryson’s work has dealt with climate in relation to human ecology, and this has lead him into extensive travel, especially to Asia where he worked primarily on anthropogenic changes of climate and landscape in general.

His best-known laboratory works are in the development of new approaches to climatology, such as airstream analysis and quantitative, objective methods of reconstructing past climates. Dr. Bryson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Meteorological Society, and a charter member of the World Council for the Biosphere.

Though born in Michigan in 1920, he regards Wisconsin as his home state, his profession as teaching, and his field as interdisciplinary earth science with a strong humanistic component.