Group Members and News

PI: Xianglei Huang

Graduate students:

  • Zhenning Yang (CSE)
  • QiKai Hu
  • Daniel Zetterberg
  • Suhui Zhao
  • Yuxuan Ke (Statistics, co-advised with Prof. Yang Chen)
  • Martina Taddia (visiting student from University of Bologna)

Research Scientist

Undergraduate Students:

  • Zhongyuan Wei (CSE)
Alums and their most recent affiliations to my best knowledge
  • Ph.D.: (first job; current job)
    • Chongxing Fan (AOS Postdoc, Princeton University)
    • Colten Peterson (NASA NPP fellow, Goddard Space Flight Center)
    • Yi-Hsuan Chen (AOS Postdoc, Princeton University; Tenure-track assistant Research Scientist, RCEC, Academia Sinica)
    • Fang Pan (NASA NPP Fellow; JD Digits, China)
    • Chunpeng Wang (Analyst, Ford Inc; Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon, USA)
    • Huiwen Chuang (Taiwan, ROC)
    • Li Xu (co-advised with Joyce Penner; Research Scientist, UC Irvine)
  • Postdocs:
    • Wenze Yang(Sr. Software Engineer, Oculli)
    • Lei Song (Associate Director of HAAS, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, China Academy of Sciences)
    • Xiuhong Chen (Application Programmer/Senior Analyst, the University of Michigan)
    • Xianwen Jing (Associate Professor, Hubei Normal University, China)
  • M.S.:
    • Qikai Hu (Ph.D. student in CLaSP, University of Michigan)
    • Rishitha Gollamudi (ECE, University of Michigan)
    • Lu Ren (World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Swiss)
    • Hongze Cheng (TDengine, China)
    • Haoming Shen (Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas)
    • Zach Fair (Postdoc, NASA GSFC)
  • Undergraduates:
    • LeKeisha Suggs (Senior Patent Attorney, Schaeffler Group, USA)
    • Andrew Chen (Resident Physician, Keck Medicine of USC)
    • Han Wang (Ph.D. student at Courant Institute of Mathematics, NYU)
    • Trent Frey (Meteorologist, NOAA National Weather Service)
    • Yifan Cai (Ph.D. student, University of Pennsylvania)
    • Edric Guo (EECS/UM)
    • Jiayue Lu (USC)
    • Yunfei Ma (MIT)
    • Qian Lin (Facebook)
    • Chris Thomas (Master in Nuclear Engineering/University of Michigan)
    • Julia Marchese (Physics/LSA)
  • Visitor and their current affiliations:
    • Xuemei Chen (METEO FRANCE, France)
    • Wentao Duan (Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China)
    • Prof. Jonathan Wright (Tsinghua University, China)

Group News
  • September 2024, welcome Martina Taddia from the University of Bologna to join our group as a visiting graduate student for three months.
  • September 2024, we started a new DoE E3SM project under the RGMA program, with a nickname of PCLF-SL, in collaboration with Dr. Hailong Wang at PNNL and Dr. Wuyin Lin at BNL.
  • June 2024, both PREFIRE CubeSats have been successfully deployed to space (link), we will start to process L2 data in about several weeks!
  • May 2024, Akshar Cowlagi and Derrek Zhao, two high-school volunteers working in our group in 2022-2023, will attend MIT and Northwestern University, respectively. Best wishes to both of them!
  • March 2024, Chongxing Fan successfully defended his thesis, and, on the same day, was awarded Outstanding Student Presentation Award by AGU for his presentation in Fall AGU 2023 conference. He will carry out his postdoctoral research at the prestigious AOS program of Princeton University.
  • August 2023, NASA has selected launch services for the PREFIRE mission, a mission that our group has participated in (NASA press release, Rocket Lab press release)
  • Mar 2023, Chongxing has been recognized by the College of Engineering with a Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize For Distinguished Academic Achievement.
  • Mar 2023, Yi-Hsuan officially starts his tenure-track position at RCEC, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Good luck and best wishes!
  • Jan 2023, Xianglei delivered a lecture for the Distinguished Climate Lectures at the Center for Climate Sciences of JPL.
  • May 2022, Chongxing has been selected for the highly competitive NASA FINESST fellowship (a 15.8% selection rate for Earth Science applicants).
  • Apr 2022, Colten has successfully defended his dissertation, a newly minted Dr. Peterson!
  • Mar 2022, our solar forecasting team, consisting of Xianglei and Xiuhong, is one of the five final winners of the American-Made Solar Forecasting Competition. Our team, anonymized as Prompt Molly, ranked No.1 out of all 34 teams in terms of overall forecast performance across ten sites over a four-week period.
  • Mar 2022, Yi-Hsuan has been offered a tenure-track researcher position by RCEC, Academia Sinica. After 6+ years in the US, he will return to Taiwan and start his own research group.
  • Jan 2022, Colten was awarded the prestigious NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship.
  • May 2021, a published NASA earth science news article described the work by Xianwen on the direct influence of solar spectral irradiance on high-latitude climate (link). Coverages by other news media [SciTechDaily, Phys.org].
  • September 2020, Chongxing published a first-authored paper on Environmental Research Letter (link), which as one reviewer commented “is the first time that the radiative impact of large-scale solar cells installation is evaluated using satellite measurement.” You can view a video here.
  • July 2020, Colten’s 2nd first-authored paper is in press now at the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology; check it out here [link].
  • February 2020, Prof. Huang is a co-I on LIBERA, a mission selected by NASA as its first Earth Venture Continuity Mission. It will continue our measurement of the radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere. The full NASA press release can be found here [link].
  • December 2019, Yi-Hsuan successfully defended his dissertation and graduated from UM. He has accepted a postdoc offer from Princeton University/GFDL and will start there in one month. Congratulations, Dr. Chen!
  • September 2019, FORUM mission, a mission that Prof. Huang participates in as a co-I, has been officially selected as the 9th ESA Earth Explorer Mission. Relevant ESA news releases and media reports can be found here [link].
  • June 2019, Colten Peterson was awarded the NASA FINESST fellowship, a highly competitive graduate fellowship with a 14% selection rate for earth science applications.
  • August 2018, Department of Energy News on the Earth System Model Development and Analysis awards, among which is a multi-institute project led by our group.
  • July 2018, Prof. Huang is appointed as an editor for Journal of Climate.
  • February 2018, Prof. Huang is a co-I on PREFIRE, a $35M Earth Venture mission selected by NASA for measuring far-IR radiation over the Arctic region. The NASA press release on the selection of this mission can be found here.
  • November 2017, a proposal submitted to the European Space Agency (ESA) to measure the far-IR portion of the outgoing radiation from our planet, FORUM, was selected as one of the two finalists competing for the ninth Earth Explorer Mission by ESA. Prof. Huang is one of three non-ESA co-Investigators on this proposal. ESA Press release on this can be found here.
  • June 2017, a proposal led by Prof. Huang and submitted to U-M and SJTU joint research program on data science has been selected for funding. This proposal aims to use machine-learning algorithms to improve the forecast of solar irradiance and then electricity generated by PV (photovoltaic) panels. A new research direction for the group!
  • May 2017, Zach Fair was awarded the highly competitive NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship.
  • May 2017, Fang Pan successfully defended her Ph.D. and, on the day before the defense, she was awarded the highly selective NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) fellowship. Double congratulations, Dr. Pan!
  • April 2017, Colten Peterson will join our group in this incoming Fall semester. He has been awarded the MICDE graduate fellowship and the Dean’s fellowship for his outstanding academic standing. Welcome, Colten!
  • September 2016, our work on the use of commercial cloud computing for climate simulations is highlighted by Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering.
  • September 2016, Xiuhong has been appointed to Assistant Research Scientist.
  • August 2016, we have published the first-ever global surface spectral emissivity database with full coverage of the entire longwave spectrum (link to the JAS article).
  • January 2016, Yi-Hsuan has been awarded Dean’s Fellowship for his academic performance.
  • September 2015, Hongze has been awarded a merit-based travel grant by AGU Atmospheric Science Section for attending the Fall AGU conference in December.
  • August 2015, Xianglei has been selected as a recipient of the 2015 NASA Langley’s Henry J.E. Reid award (news link).
  • November 2014, We are among the winners of the inaugural Amazon Climate Research Grant and marching towards the era of cloud computing with 5 millons of CPU hours from Amazon EC2 Spot Instances( Michigan news link).
  • August 2013, Xiuhong’s recent paper has been chosen by AGU as a research spotlight across all journals published by AGU (AGU news link).
  • September 2012, we have another paper in press on the Journal of Climate, in which a simple theoretical explanation has been given to account for the weakening of the Walker circulation from the radiative-convective equilibrium perspective(link to the early online release on Journal of Climate).
  • July 2012, in the week of July 4th, our third and fourth papers on longwave band-by-band flux and cloud radiative effect studies were both in press on Journal of Climate.
  • February 2012, Huiwen successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis!
  • June 2011, Chunpeng’s first paper is now in press on JGR-Atmospheres.
  • March 2011, Huiwen won first prize (tie) in the 2011 MGU (Michigan Geophysical Union) for her work on the atmospheric bridge.
  • December 2010, Xianglei has been selected into the science definition team for CLARREO, a tier-1 mission recommended by the 2007 NRC Decadal Survey.
  • July 2010, Hui-wen’s first paper is now in press on JGR-Atmospheres(link).
  • March 2010, both Hui-wen and Chunpeng won prizes in the 2010 MGU (Michigan Geophysical Union).