On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the plane were collecting, but she was also aware that the storm’s impact on New Orleans would be devastating. This experience made her realize at a visceral level that science alone is not always enough:

“And so it was that campaign which also made me realize something extremely important, that the best science is not of much use unless it gets to where it needs to go and comes in a form that it can actually be used. And so that’s when I started really thinking  about the interface of science communication, policy, emergency management, all these different factors. […] We as atmospheric scientists form one key component to that, but there’s this whole larger framework that the information that we produce has to fit into in a way that’s going to be usable by all those different stakeholders, so that they can work to, in this case, save lives.”

An Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Deanna studies tropical cyclones, particularly the structure of their rainbands. Her interests also include orographic rain in midlatitudes, and other aspects of cloud and precipitation physics. Growing up in the tornado-prone Dallas area, she became fascinated with extreme weather events at an early age, and got drawn into atmospheric science for real when she realized how much she enjoys participating in field campaigns like the one that gave her a close-up view of Hurricane Katrina.

Deanna has also made questions of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Earth sciences a primary focus of her work — an unusual commitment for a young faculty member working under the pressures of “publish or perish”, and in this interview she talks about that decision and its implications.

The interview with Deanna Hence was recorded in August 2020.