Doron Nof, PhD - Physical Oceanography at Florida State University

Doron Nof was born in Haifa, Israel. He received both his B.Sc. and his M.S. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

His earlier professional associations include: Institute of Ocean Sciences, British Columbia, National Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow; Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami, Research Associate, Research Assistant Professor. He joined the faculty at Florida State University, Department of Oceanography about twenty (20) years ago as an associate professor. His research and productivity have been rated among the best of the department throughout these years. Consequently, his promotion to full professor was approved about eight years after the completion of his Ph.D. As is apparent from the C.V., he has been active in various aspects of physical oceanography. His topics of interest in the past have been: coastal currents, shelf dynamics, flows through straits and passages, boundary current dynamics, upwelling in coastal regions, the dynamics of eddies in the upper and deep ocean, equatorial dynamics, general circulation problems, marginal sea dynamics and cross-equatorial flows.

Some of his work has had impact not only on physical oceanography but also on other aspects of human endeavors; his theories on the Red Sea crossing and Jesus "walking on ice" have been discussed in major newspapers and science editorials around the world including the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Geographic. Dr. Nof's research has also been discussed by the major networks: BBC, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC.

Dr. Nof's international reputation was established very early in his career and, as a result, he was invited to the former Soviet Union well before the collapse of the Union (1989) and it's opening to the west. He recruited, at the time, the first Russian physical oceanography graduate student (Ivan Lebedev) to ever enter an American university. (Ivan later graduated from Florida State University with a Ph.D. and went on to the University of Adelaide in Australia). Dr. Nof is usually invited a few times a year to present talks in national and international conferences (e.g., International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans, IAPSO. On the administrative side, he served on numerous executive committees at FSU, on tenure and promotion committees of major institutions around the world (e.g., Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, WHOI).

Dr. Nof's visiting positions include: Summer program in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1986, 1988, 1997; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Hobart, Australia, 1987; Visiting Professor, School of Mathematics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 1986; University of Paris, Laboratoire D'Oceanographie Dynamique et de Climatologie, 1987. Also, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Tokyo University, and Hokkaido University (Sapporo, Japan) in 1996.

The American Meteorological Society elected him a Fellow in 1993, an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to the atmospheric or related oceanic or hydrologic sciences over a period of years. In 1995, Dr. Nof received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship for senior scientists (equivalent to the more familiar Humboldt Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship). In 2005, Dr. Nof was awarded the prestigious EGU Fridtjof Nansen Medal.

Dr. Nof has received numerous grants. His Office of Naval Research grants include: The Role of Diabatic Heating and Cooling in Boundary Current Dynamics (1979-81); Study of the Water Exchange between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean (through the Windward Passage) (1981-82); Mesoscale Processes in the Ocean (1982-93); How Much Water Passes through each of the Indonesian Passages? (1996-99); The Tsushima Warm Current and its Various Branches (2001-02).

His National Science Foundation grants include: Theoretical Studies of Eddy-Environment Interaction (1987-90); Nonlinear Eddy-Environment Interactions (1990-94); Nonlinear Processes in High Latitudes (1991-95); Flows through Multiple Gaps with Application to the Indonesian Throughflow (1995-98); Rings, Eddies and Retroflection as a Mechanism for Inter-basin Exchange (1996-99); The Role of Agulhas Rings in the Western South Atlantic (2000-02); The Agulhas-Brazil Current Domino (2003-2007); The Bering Strait as a Super Strait (2005-2008) and The Agulhas Current System (2005-2008).

He received a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study Oceanic Current Model Development (1988-89) and has received National Aeronautics and Space Administration grants for Studies of Variable Climate Processes (1995-98); Zonal Propagation of Nonlinear Oceanic Anomalies (1998-01); Nonlinear Exchange Processes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans (1998-2001); Variability of the Western Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden (2001-04) and The Role of the Bering Strait in the General Oceanic and Circulation Climate (2003-2006). In addition, he received NASA Fellowship Grants for his Ph.D. students (Harper Simmons, Catherine Sandal and Volodymyr Zharkov). Dr. Simmons received the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research and is now a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Dr. Nof also received a grant (with N. Paldor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) from the Binational Science Foundation to look at Reddies as a Means of Exporting Water from the Red Sea (1997-2000).

Dr. Nof's Biographical History