Profile of Isaac M. Held
- Bijal Trivedi, Freelance Science Writer
Stories about global warming pepper the covers of magazines and newspapers on a weekly if not daily basis. But when Isaac Held entered the field of climate studies in the early 1970s, researchers were just beginning to publicize claims that human activities were generating pollutants that could dramatically change the Earth’s climate. Motivated by a desire to understand climate change, Held, now a senior research scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, NJ, has focused on both theoretical and applied atmospheric science. He has explored the scale of cyclones and anticyclones, landscape effects on atmospheric circulation, factors controlling the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator, and overall mechanisms and impacts of global warming.
Held is best known for modeling Hadley cells, which describe the properties of atmospheric circulation in Earth’s equatorial zone. His three decades of research have garnered him numerous awards, and in 2003, Held was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. His Inaugural Article, published in a recent issue of PNAS (1), deals specifically with projected climate change in Africa’s Sahel region, the transition zone between the Sahara desert and the rainforests of Central Africa and the Guinean Coast.
Coming to America
Held was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Ulm, Germany. While living in the camp, his father, Israel Held, met his mother, Bertha Blum, who was a survivor of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland, during the Holocaust. In 1952, the family received long-awaited passage to the United States and settled in St. Paul, MN, where Held’s father worked at a meatpacking plant. In 1956, Israel Held passed away, leaving Bertha to raise Isaac and his older brother, Herman, while she worked full-time as a seamstress. Although not scientifically inclined, Held’s mother strongly encouraged the boys to excel in their schoolwork, …
