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In Memoriam: Timothy Ray
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In Memoriam: Timothy Ray
Special recognition is made of contributions by IGERT doctoral student Timothy Ray, who passed away suddenly on May 16. Tim had a uniquely personal commitment not only to oceanographic and climate science but in particular to understanding the societal value and implications of the research and to communicating this to the public and to policy makers.
Timothy Ray, a 3rd year doctoral student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, passed away suddenly at his home on May 16, 2011. In his 31 years, Tim led a remarkably full and varied life. He was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (B.S. Oceanography, 2002) and the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey (M.S. Physical Oceanography, 2003), and he served in the U.S. Navy until 2007 as a Naval Oceanographer. Tim was an extraordinary athlete, as a distance swimmer while at Annapolis, and recently as a core member of the UCSD Triathlon Team. He’d completed the Boston Marathon in April. Tim was an outdoorsman with a strong and personal commitment to living in tune with the planet and practicing environmental sustainability. As an oceanographer and climate scientist, Tim’s work at Scripps meshed perfectly with his life. He was carrying out pioneering research on interannual variability in ocean salinity, using new data from the Argo Program. His concept of salinity as the “Oceanic rain gauge” was demonstrating that regional variations in Tropical Pacific evaporation and rainfall could be monitored very sensitively from their accumulated impacts on ocean salinity. Beyond the basic science, as a student in the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, Tim’s unique commitment was to understanding the societal value and implications of his research on the Earth’s freshwater cycle, and to communicating this to the public and to policy makers. His poster on the “Oceanic rain gauge” is a finalist in the May 25th IGERT national poster competition in Washington D.C. Tim is survived by his parents, Larry and Julie Ray, by his two brothers, and by an amazing number of friends and colleagues whose lives his had touched and moved.
