Why Colin O’Dowd is on this page

Heritage: Colin Dermot O’Dowd is an Irish-born physicist and director of the Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies at the University of Galway, Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Direct Irish-born lineage with confirmed Galway academic base.

Colin Dermot O’Dowd is an Irish physicist and atmospheric scientist whose research on aerosols, air-sea exchange and the role of biogenic and marine aerosol in cloud formation has made him one of the most highly-cited atmospheric researchers of his generation. He took his BSc in Physics at NUI Galway in 1987 and his PhD at UMIST (the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) in 1992; he has been Professor of Physics at NUI Galway (now the University of Galway) since 2009 and is Director of the Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies, which operates the Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station — one of the European Union’s principal background atmospheric monitoring sites — on the west coast of Ireland. He has authored or co-authored over 250 scientific publications. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2002, a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2003, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2011, and was awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal in Geosciences in 2013.

Heritage notes

Family root: Ireland — irish-born-confirmed.

The directory threads Colin O’Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.