William B. Curry

Bill Curry is a Senior Scientist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the former Director of the WHOI Ocean and Climate Change Institute (OCCI). Following graduate school at Brown University, he came to WHOI as a Postdoctoral Scholar in 1980 and he has been on the Scientific Staff since 1981. From 1988 to 1990, Curry served as an Associate Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences. From 1995 to 1999, he was the Chair of the WHOI Department of Geology and Geophysics and he served as the OCCI Director from 2001 to 2004, and returned to the position again in 2007. Bill studies the past history of climate and ocean circulation, particularly how large changes in ocean circulation and chemistry have affected the carbon cycle and ice age climate. Bill served on the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council for six years as well as numerous National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) advisory and review panels. In 2004, he was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Curry has participated in 11 oceanographic expeditions (seven as Chief Scientist) to collect sediment cores for climate reconstructions. The expeditions have returned more than 400 cores from a variety of regions in the North Atlantic and South Atlantic Oceans. He has trained four students to the Ph.D. level: Niall Slowey (Ph.D. 1991, now at Texas A&M), Thomas Marchitto (Ph.D. 1999, now at University of Colorado and the Intitute for Arctic and Alpine Research), David Lund (Ph.D. 2005, currently a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at Cal Tech; beginning at the University of Michigan in Fall 2008), and Nathalie Goodkin (Ph.D. 2007, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, beginning at the University of Hong Kong in Fall 2008).