Elena Fernandez
Internship Season
Summer 2025-2026
Internship Alignment
EPIC
Institution and PhD Advisors
University at Albany, SUNY | Andrea Lopez Lang and Zheng Wu
Proposal Title
Implementing Machine Learning to Resolve Troposphere-Stratosphere Coupling and Teleconnections in S2S Forecasts
What inspired you to become a scientist (maybe something from your childhood or youth)?
My mother teaches high school earth science, so she largely influenced my passion for earth systems science. Throughout my childhood, she always ensured that our family stopped at science museums in any city we visited, and anytime there was a remotely weather-related exhibit, I gravitated toward it. The same theme has continued throughout my educational career to the present day.
What do you hope to achieve with your WINGS PhD Dissertation Fellowship opportunity?
I greatly value the connections, advice, and mentoring I have received throughout my graduate career, and I view collaboration with my peers in this field as an invaluable resource. Through the WINGS Dissertation Fellowship, I am looking forward to making many more connections and having the extraordinary opportunity to learn from those at UCAR/NCAR and NOAA’s WPO in the final year of my dissertation research.
How does your research generally contribute to our world as a whole (in a way that the average person can understand and relate to)?
My current PhD research focuses on ways we can improve two-week to two-month timescale (S2S) forecasting of wintertime temperature extremes using information from interactions across layers of the atmosphere, specifically tropospheric-stratospheric interactions. Any efforts in improving S2S forecasting, especially for predictions of winter weather extremes, are beneficial for increasing emergency preparedness and reducing financial or social impacts caused by high-impact weather.
