Inez Fung

Biography


Inez Fung Climate Science
S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sc.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

Inez Y. Fung is a Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her S.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Sc.D. in Meteorology from MIT. She was an NRC postdoc at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and carried out her research at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of Victoria in Canada. She joined the Berkeley faculty in 1998 as the founding director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center. She was also the founding director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.


Fung's research focuses on understanding and predicting the causes and consequences of changes in the abundance of climatically-significant trace species in the atmosphere. Her group develops and applies large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, methane, dust and other trace substances around the globe; the transport and mixing of trace constituents by atmospheric circulation; and the interaction of these trace constituents with climate.


Fung is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of Academia Sinica (Taiwan); a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society; and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union, and a Distinguished Achievement Award for climate system modeling from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She contributed to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.


Fung is a subject in a recent biography series for middle-school readers "Women's Adventure in Science" launched by the National Academy of Sciences. The title of her biography is "Forecast Earth".


Fung was appointed to the National Science Board in 2012.