Isaac Held

Isaac Meyer Held (born October 23, 1948) is an American meteorologist. He is a retired senior research scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Held was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

Biography Born to refugee parents in Ulm, Germany in 1948, Held came to Minnesota with his family at the age of 4. His father died when he was only eight and he and his brother, Herman, were raised by his mother Bertha, a Holocaust survivor who worked as a seamstress. Held did his undergraduate work in physics at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1969 and started a graduate program in theoretical physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. While there, he discovered climate science which led to his transferring to the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1976 under the supervision of Syukuro Manabe. After a brief stint as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Held returned to Princeton to join the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in 1978, as well as teaching in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) Program at Princeton.

Research Held's research has had two major themes. The first is understanding how the Earth's climate responds to changes in the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet or to the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. His early work highlighted the importance of the lapse rate in determining the climate's response to radiation changes. 1991: Fellow, American Meteorological Society 1995: Fellow, American Geophysical Union 2003: Elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences 2011: BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award of Climate Change for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to our understanding of the structure of atmospheric circulation systems, and the role of water vapor – the most important greenhouse gas – in Climate Change. 2018: Roger Revelle Medal, American Geophysical Union