Edward L. Bensman

BS ’83, Atmospheric Science, Purdue University
MS ’93, Meteorology, Florida State University
PhD ’00, Meteorology, Florida State University

"At Purdue, I got to share a common interest in meteorology with fellow students."

Figurative lightning struck Edward L. Bensman when he began his Atmospheric Science studies in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue. His love of the weather grew immensely when he was brought in for a project developing computer code to calculate atmospheric radiation effects as part of an early global climate model. He was hired to assist with compiling and executing the code on a mini-mainframe computer -- one of the few in existence at Purdue in the early 1980s. This work instilled a great interest in numerical weather prediction that would later result in a PhD in this field.

Since then, Bensman has made tremendous meteorological strides for industry, academia and the U.S. government with more than 30 years experience in operations and research, including software development, increasing roles and responsibilities in senior management. His skills have been utilized by the National Science Foundation, National Center for Atmospheric Research and the U.S. Air Force.

At University of Notre Dame, Bensman balanced his time as a leading science computational engineer in South Bend with teaching courses after becoming a research associate professor. He still serves as program director in Physical & Dynamic Meteorology for NSF.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

• 2009 - Named foundational Director of Engineering and Science Computing at the University of Notre Dame
• 2006 - Hired as high performance computing engineer to establish the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame
• 2005 - As Program Manager with Raytheon Company, contributed significantly to the Joint Environmental Toolkit contract with the U.S. Air Force and Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, version 2, for National Weather Service Forecast Offices and National Centers
• 2003 - Successfully developed plan to modernize the computing system at the Air Force Climate Center in Asheville, North Carolina
• 2002 - Worked with government contractors and U.S. Air Force program managers to implement a weather forecasting and cloud analysis and forecasting systems