Scientific and Technical Leadership

Scientists from Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) contribute world-class research and development. More than half hold Ph.D.’s or advanced degrees. Our scientists serve as faculty and instructors at area universities and also as committee members of organizations such as the National Research Council. 

AER staff members are active participants in professional journal review boards as well as panel and mail proposal reviews for government agencies. They're active members of professional organizations such as the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). AER scientists have served as President of the AMS and as Vice Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Please also view more AER scientists and technologists including authors of our peer-reviewed research papers and bloggers. We invite you to contact individual scientists and technologists.

Ron Isaacs, President and Chief Executive Officer

Ron Isaacs is president and chief executive officer of Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER). He oversees strategy and operations for weather-, climate-, and environment-related risk management and decision support products and services. Clients including insurance carriers, reinsurers, energy producers and investors, and government agencies and contractors rely on his insights to leverage the latest science and analytics in practical ways to improve operational results.

Mr. Isaacs has played a key role in growing AER to more than 180 scientists and engineers, and more than half hold Ph.D.’s or advanced degrees. The scientific research specializes in data analytics, modeling, sensing, and prediction of phenomena in the atmosphere, ocean, and space. Mr. Isaacs is the author of numerous articles in refereed scientific journals and a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and IEEE. He holds ME and MS degrees in Applied Physics and Earth and Planetary Physics from Harvard University. He is a veteran of the U. S. Air Force.

Guy Seeley, PhD, Executive Vice President

Under Dr. Seeley’s leadership, AER technical divisions deliver advanced science and technology projects ranging from basic research to commercial products. He has led contract R&D efforts at Air Force, Army and Navy laboratories for over 20 years. Dr. Seeley has developed and deployed advanced mission planning technologies in combat operations. These weather impact decision aids combine terrain, weather, radiative transfer and sensor hardware expertise with advanced computer graphics processing to provide pilots with vital situational awareness day or night.

Dr. Seeley also leads remote sensing projects in land surface and vegetation characterization from satellite observations and product integration of the resulting surface maps. One example is the development and operation of commercial GIS products assessing wildfire hazard for the insurance industry by integrating multi-spectral imagery with road network and terrain data. Dr. Seeley received his PhD in Physical Chemistry under Professor Thomas Keyes at Boston University.

David B. Hogan, Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice President

Mr. Hogan oversees AER's Software Engineering and Information Systems and is responsible for the technologies, IT infrastructure and software processes employed by AER's commercial services and government programs. With over 30 years of advanced system design and development experience, Mr. Hogan’s career focus has been on the development of advanced solutions for challenging environmental and remote sensing problems including transition to operational systems for commercial, government and military applications. He managed AER's GOES-R and NPOESS programs where he developed AER's management and software engineering processes for large-scale software development. Mr. Hogan received a BS in Physical Sciences and an MS in Meteorology from the University of Maryland.

Ross N. Hoffman, PhD, Chief Scientist and Vice President, Research and Development

Dr. Hoffman’s principal areas of interest are objective analysis and assimilation methods, atmospheric dynamics, climate theory, and atmospheric radiation.  He has made significant contributions in the field of data assimilation, including the development of some variational techniques.  He is a member of the NSCAT Science Team and the EOS SeaWinds Science Team.  Dr. Hoffman holds a magna cum laude BS from Brown University, an MA in Mathematics from Boston University and a PhD in Meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Prior to AER, Dr. Hoffman worked at the Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheric Sciences as an NCR RRA and USRA Visiting Scientist.

Hilary E. "Ned" Snell, Ph.D., Principal Scientist and Vice President, GOES-R

Dr. Snell assumed leadership of AER's GOES-R team working on the nation's next generation geo-synchronous weather and environment satellite, and became Program Manager for AER's GOES-R effort in January, 2012. Earlier he was promoted to Vice President to lead Remote Sensing in 2008. Dr. Snell is experienced in all aspects of both theoretical and experimental remote sensing, including extensive infrared and ultraviolet radiative transfer model and retrieval algorithm development. He led the development of the infrared ozone retrieval algorithm for the infrared algorithms of the Ozone Mapping and Profiling Suite (OMPS) and served as AER Project Manager for algorithm development for the Cross-Track Infrared and Microwave Sounder Suite (CrIMSS), part of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Satellite System (NPOESS).

Dr. Snell is a member of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Prior to joining AER in 1994, he studied and received a PhD in Atmospheric and Space Sciences from the University of Michigan and an AB in Geophysics from the University of Chicago.

Steven J. Lowe, Senior Engineer and Vice President, Modeling and Simulation

Mr. Lowe has been actively engaged in the Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation community for over 15 years, pursuing the objective of including realistic environment representation in military applications.  He has led the development of enabling technology and supported major simulation programs for all service branches, currently as the Principal Investigator for the Environmental Data Cube Support System (EDCSS) program, a tri-service initiative to provide ready access to multi-domain environment data, effects models and support products.  Mr. Lowe holds BS and MS degrees in Aerospace and Ocean Engineering from Virginia Tech and has maintained a strong interest in atmospheric fluid dynamics throughout his career.  Prior to joining AER, Mr. Lowe worked for SAIC, supporting the Naval Research Laboratory in the area of numerical weather prediction model development, and for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in the area of air-sea interface research.

Eli Mlawer, PhD, Senior Scientist, and Leader of Atmospheric Composition and Radiation

Dr. Mlawer’s main areas of interest include atmospheric radiative transfer, climate study and the characterization of molecular collisional broadening.  As part of his involvement in the DoE Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Program, Dr. Mlawer is the leader of the Broadband Heating Rate Profile project, an effort to compute fluxes and heating rates in clear and cloudy conditions at the ARM sites and to perform a closure analysis on these calculations using surface and TOA radiation measurements.  He also was co-PI of the two Radiative Heating in Underexplored Bands Campaigns (RHUBC), ASR field experiments held at the North Slope of Alaska site in 2007 and at a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 2009.  Dr. Mlawer is Lead Developer of the MT_CKD water vapor continuum model and is involved in efforts to validate and improve this model based on comparisons with spectrally resolved measurements.  He has primary responsibility for the design, implementation and validation of RRTM, a fast radiative transfer model appropriate for climate applications.  He is the Co-Leader of the Continual Intercomparison of Radiation Codes, an effort sponsored by the International Radiation Commission and the GEWEX Radiation Panel to evaluate radiation codes used in climate models.  Dr. Mlawer is also a member of the International Radiation Commission.

Robert Morris, Ph.D., Principal Scientist and Vice-President, Space Weather

Dr. Robert Morris leads AER's research, operations, and support in the areas of space environment and space weather. The initiatives include space physics research, space weather specification and forecasting, development of decision aids for government and commercial customers, and support of government space weather R&D and operations. Dr. Morris has over 24 years of government laboratory experience in space environment and remote sensing, including 10 years leading the Air Force Research Laboratory's Battlespace Environment Division. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and over 100 conference papers. Dr. Morris is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and an AFRL Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Boston College and his B.S. in chemistry at Bates College.

Rui M. Ponte, PhD, Principal Scientist and Leader, Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate

Dr. Ponte’s broad and multidisciplinary research interests have led him to study, among other topics, the general circulation of the ocean and atmosphere, using the angular momentum approach; the effects of the ocean on the Earth’s rotation and gravity field; the high-frequency oceanic response to atmospheric forcing; the oceanic meridional overturning circulation; and use of satellites to improve knowledge about the state of the ocean-atmosphere system.  He has done extensive work on modeling and interpretation of sea level and ocean bottom pressure signals and is currently a member of various NASA satellite mission science teams (Ocean Surface Topography, GRACE, Ocean Surface Salinity) and the GODAE OceanView Science Team.  He has been a member of various special working groups (IAU/IUGG Working Group on Non-Rigid Earth Nutation Theory, IAG Special Study Group on Interactions of the Earth’s Rotational Dynamics with the Oceans and Atmospheres) and the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) Special Bureau for the Ocean.  His current research includes global ocean modeling and data assimilation efforts as part of Estimating the Circulation & Climate of the Ocean for the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (ECCO-GODAE), as well as using ensemble methods for regional ocean analysis and prediction.  Dr. Ponte’s work is summarized in close to 80 papers in the refereed literature.  Dr. Ponte is at AER, where he has been since 1989.  He holds a BS degree in Physics from the University of Rhode Island, an MS degree in Oceanography from MIT, and a PhD in Physical Oceanography from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

T. Scott Zaccheo, PhD, Chief Software Engineer and Vice President, Software Engineering

Dr. Zaccheo is an expert in image processing and systems engineering and has spent the last 15 years applying engineering principles to the process of acquiring and analyzing scientific data.  At AER, Dr. Zaccheo has been the primary architect of numerous scientific systems, including an interactive suite of analysis tools designed to assess the performance of retrieval algorithms associated with heritage and next-generation, earth-observing environmental sensors.  He has also been a member of a research team responsible for the design and analysis of inverse methods for retrieving atmospheric moisture and temperature profiles from microwave and infrared sounder data.  Prior to joining AER, Dr. Zaccheo worked at Lincoln Laboratory on characterization of infrared clutter and the assessment of its impact on detection and estimation techniques.  He has been a contributing member of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) algorithm teams.  He has authored or coauthored more than a dozen scientific papers and holds three degrees in Electrical Engineering, including a PhD from Tufts University.

We invite you to contact individual scientists and technologists. Or  view more scientists and technologists at AER.