Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently — but on this episode you can actually hear her voice.

Melanie was born and raised in Switzerland. She did her MS degree at ETH Zurich, in Atmospheric Science, and then spent a couple of years working in the reinsurance industry, at Swiss Re in Zurich, studying extreme weather risk. That was a good job, and could easily have led to a permanent career and nice life in her home country. But Melanie didn’t feel challenged enough by that life, so she left to do a Ph.D. in Applied Math at Columbia.

“Whenever I get too comfortable, I make decisions that get me out of my comfort zone.”

Melanie wrote her doctoral thesis on the extratropical transition of tropical cyclones, and is now a postdoc at Caltech working with Tapio Schneider’s CliMA project to design a new climate model. She’s thinking about her next steps. They may or may not be in academia.

You can see all your peers starting their post doc positions and […] my natural reaction to that is, let me not go with the flow.

Melanie and Adam recorded this episode in Costa Rica, while there for the NSF OTREC field campaign, just a few days after Melanie’s thesis defense. Besides her life and career to date, they talk about religion and spirituality, the merits of academic vs. private sector jobs, and how to maximize one’s positive impact on the world.

“Most people want to have, want to feel like they’re having an impact…they want something that’s emotionally satisfying and not necessarily… if you actually evaluate what your contribution is to the world, that would actually look good in that evaluation.”

The interview with Melanie Bieli was recorded in August 2019.