by Catherine Price
Climatologist Inez Fung, professor of environmental science, policy, and management, is one of 10 luminary minds in the spotlight in a new book series for middle-schoolers, Women’s Adventures in Science.
Forecast Earth: The Story of Climate Scientist Inez Fung traces her childhood in Hong Kong and studies at MIT, and how her fascination with science led her to Berkeley, where she became the principal architect of climate modeling methods that distill the Earth’s physical, biological, and chemical reactions into mathematical equations. Then computers crunch the numbers in order to forecast Earth’s climate change.
The goal of the series, series, Women’s Adventures in Science, is to provide middle school-aged girls who are interested in science with strong female role models. But Fung hopes that the series will encourage both girls and boys to pursue whatever interests they are passionate about, without worrying about what other people think.
“If someone tells me I’m not normal, that’s great,” says Fung. “Because normal means average, and I don’t want to be average. I want to be special. And that’s the message I want to get across to the young people: that they should be special.”
Forecast Earth is available at Amazon.