Dr. David Lary, an atmospheric scientist whose career has taken him from Cambridge University and Tel Aviv University to NASA, has landed at UT Dallas, where he joined the physics faculty.
His research interests include using remote sensing and computation to study the Earth system, ranging from atmospheric composition and ocean ecosystems to land surface classification. He is about to take delivery of a robotic helicopter equipped with a suite of sensors and cameras that will be used for studies of air quality, agriculture and geophysics.
Lary, is an associate professor in the William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences at UT Dallas, founding director of the UT Dallas Multi-Scale Integrated Intelligent Interactive Sensing Consortium and a scholar of the Institute for Integrative Health. He is developing a software system that uses autonomy, image processing, large-scale computation and machine learning for a variety of applications, including delivering daily global estimates of the ambient concentration of small airborne particulates known to be environmental triggers for a range of significant health issues.
His studies have highlighted the role of carbon-containing aerosols in the atmosphere. His software system, AutoChem, won five NASA awards and has been used to perform long-term analysis of atmospheric chemistry from multiple satellite observations, including those from the NASA Aura satellite. He is the author of more than 80 academic papers.
Dr. Lary earned his undergraduate degree in physics and chemistry from King’s College London in 1987 and a Ph.D. in atmospheric chemistry from Cambridge in 1991.
From 1996 to 2001 he was a Royal Society Research Fellow at Cambridge University. From 1998 to 2000 he also held a joint appointment at the University of Tel Aviv University as an Alon Fellow and senior lecturer.
Between 2001 and 2010 Dr. Lary worked in various branches at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center including the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, the Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch, the Software Integration and Visualization Office and the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center.