Isabelle Bey
Isabelle Bey, Executive Director Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM)
Interview with Isabelle Bey
by Elke Hodson
Dr. Isabelle Bey is Executive Director of a new and exciting cross-disciplinary Center for Climate Systems Modeling C2SM at ETH Zurich. The center is taking a leading role in developing the tools needed to study climate processes on scales as small as a water droplet to those as big as the globe.
Dr. Bey began her career in her French homeland with two Master's degrees in atmospheric chemistry and materials & process engineering at the University of Grenoble and Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), France, respectively. Four years later, she completed her Ph.D. in atmospheric chemistry at the University of Paris-XII.
She continued her career abroad with a postdoctoral position at Harvard University in the United States. While at Harvard, she was part of the team which developed a widely used computer model to simulate the composition of the atmosphere, focusing on chemical compounds which are relevant for both air quality and climate.
Isabelle Bey first came to Switzerland in 2001 as an assistant professor of atmospheric chemistry at EPFL, where she further developed her research ideas and passed down her passion for her work to her students and postdoctoral researchers.
In 2009, Dr. Bey was recruited to head the newly established C2SM. The center is the brainchild of a group of ETHZ professors and other researchers at MeteoSwiss and Empa who joined forces to further develop climate models and datasets. As climate models become more and more complex, a coordinating center is needed to provide "technicians at the modeling level", as Dr. Bey calls it. "One individual research group can no longer deal with the increasingly complexity of climate models alone," she adds.
At C2SM, Dr. Bey is heavily involved in creating new climate scenarios for Switzerland through the CH2011 initiative. Both the private and public sector need climate information on a more detailed scale. In particular, tourism destinations in Switzerland, such as ski resorts, have been asking for Swiss climate predictions as they plan for the climate of the future. The CH2011 initiative will deliver improved climate predictions, but many uncertainties in our understanding of the complex climate system still remain. As we head into a future with an uncertain climate, C2SM will be a vital resource for Switzerland.
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