It has been a long and winding road that has brought Mike Friedman to AMS-one that started with a childhood interest in astronomy as he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, continued as an undergraduate physics major at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and has led to his present positions as journals production coordinator and technical editor at the AMS Headquarters in Boston.
Looking for alternative career paths to the standard stressful academic life while finishing a postdoctoral appointment at Oregon State University, Mike came to AMS as a technical editor in 2001. As an editor, Mike has worked on many of the journals, including Monthly Weather Review, Weather and Forecasting, Journal of Climate, and Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. "I've always enjoyed writing and even unwittingly trained for an editing job in graduate school by helping foreign colleagues with their writing," Mike says.
Following his undergraduate days, Mike worked for a short time at NASA's Johnson Space Center before attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduate school to study planetary science. He received his M.S. from UCLA in 1989 and headed to the corporate world as a systems engineer working on NASA programs for Lockheed. There were tough times in the aerospace industry in the early 1990s, and after barely surviving one round of layoffs, Mike started working on Lockheed's (ultimately unsuccessful) proposal to build the Earth Observing System satellites. "It was then that I realized I was a lot more interested in what these instruments were going to study than in building a satellite platform to fly them on," he says. So, with that in mind, he and his wife Holly, a geographer, headed to the University of Wisconsin, where he ended up specializing in atmospheric radiative transfer and remote sensing, and received his Ph.D. in 1998.
Just over a year ago, Mike assumed additional responsibilities overseeing production for all of the journals and also serves on the AMS publications electronic task force that is helping define the future of AMS journals. The production work involves ensuring production schedules are adhered to and adjusted when necessary, coordinating special issues of the journals, supervising production tasks, and interacting with press, authors, and editors. As part of the task force, Mike is helping guide AMS's transition to a more electronic and efficient work flow that will save weeks of production time over the present work flow. "I'm very lucky to have found a job that fits me so well, and to have the opportunity to have a real impact on how scientific results, in the form of research papers, are communicated and distributed in this rapidly changing environment," says Mike. "Plus, I get to work with a great team of people."
A former collegiate soccer player, Mike helps coach both his daughter's and son's youth soccer teams, as well as playing occasionally himself. Also an avid baseball fan-"growing up in St. Louis, there was almost no choice," he jokes-Mike has now taken to cheering on the Red Sox in addition to his hometown Cardinals.
-RACHEL S. THOMAS-MEDWID
[Sidebar]
EDUCATION
THE GERMAN ACADEMICS INTERNATIONAL NETWORK
The German Academics International Network (GAIN) was created by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Humboldt Foundation. GAIN provides support for German scholars and scientists working in North America by facilitating networking within the community and improving the flow of information on current developments in higher education and new career opportunities at universities and research institutions in Germany. To get involved, contact Katja Simons (e-mail: simons@daad.org). For more information, go to www.daad.org/gain.
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