Bruce Lee retirement ceremony is Aug. 28

A reception will be held in the UND Aerospace Weather Center in Odegard Hall, Room 257, to celebrate the retirement of Bruce Lee from the Atmospheric Sciences department.

Lee’s professional career was about evenly divided between the academic and private sectors. His formal education included a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics from the University of Minnesota, M.S. in Meteorology from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 1988, after spending six years as a performance engineer with Republic and Northwest Airlines, Lee decided to transition from aerospace engineering to another fluid-mechanics discipline: the atmospheric sciences. Following graduate school and post-doctoral studies, in 1997, he took a faculty position at the University of Northern Colorado. Within a few years, Lee was co-leading the meteorology program with Catherine Finley as an associate professor.

Following nearly seven years at UNC, it was off to the forests of northern Minnesota as an opportunity arose for the Finley and Lee team to ply their craft in the renewable energy space as senior atmospheric scientists at WindLogics, Inc. After a dozen years at WindLogics and several years running a small research-oriented LLC, in 2019 Lee joined the University of North Dakota Department of Atmospheric Sciences and over the next seven years held assistant research professor and adjunct faculty titles.

A common thread spanning all the years since the career change to atmospheric sciences was the love of studying severe convective storms, especially tornadic storms. This led to participation in state-of-the-art numerical modeling research and multiple tornadic supercell field projects including being the director of two of them. Getting the chance to educate the next generation of atmospheric scientists and research/publish in the severe local storms field was a childhood dream come true.

All are invited to join in honoring Lee from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. We hope to see you there!