Here is a brief autobiography about me!

  I was born on June 27, 1969 in Waukegan, Illinois.  I had a bad case of senioritis in high school, and graduated early from Waukegan East High School in January, 1987.  I bounced around several colleges trying to figure out what I wanted to do - going from being an accounting major at the College of Lake County to aeronautics (pilot training) at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  While in flight school, I decided that meteorology was something that I really was interested in, so I switched my major one last time. 

  In 1992, I went to Northern Illinois University to study meteorology.  I was the President of the Student Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, and the Student Weather Director (in charge of doing the weather observation and running the computer lab), during my senior year.  I graduated with my B.S. degree in Meteorology in May, 1996. It was during my time at Northern Illinois University that I developed my love for storm chasing (pictures coming soon).  It all started when I attended SKYWARN training in the spring of 1993.  My first successful chase, however, did not happen until I went on the College of DuPage storm chasing trip in late May of 1994.  On the first full day of chasing, we caught a tornado near Northfield, Texas.  After that, I was hooked on chasing tornadoes.

  I wanted to go to graduate school, and hating winter, applied to the majority of meteorology graduate schools located SOUTH of Illinois!  I was always interested in radar, so I chose Texas A&M University that operated their own radar.  My masters thesis was on the contamination of Doppler radar products (in particular, the VAD Wind Profile) by migrating birds.  I took a nice long time completing this task, however!!

  In the middle of graduate school, I decided to celebrate my first retirement!  I traveled to many parts of the world (Japan twice, Australia twice, Russia a handful of times, Brazil, and numerous times to the various countries in western Europe).  In all, I've been to 17 countries on 5 continents, most of them more than once.  Still remaining on my travel wishlist is somewhere in Africa (to complete my quest to set foot on all inhabited continents) and Greece/Turkey.

  During my time in Texas, I also kept up with my storm chasing activities.  On May 3, 1999, I had my most successful storm chase trip ever - witnessing 10 tornadoes (pics coming soon), several of which were F4 and F5.  I helped a fellow grad student, David Gold, with his storm chasing business (Silver Lining Tours) during 1999 as well.  In 2001, I was asked to take the reigns as Coordinator of TAMMSSDA (the Texas A&M Mobile Severe Storms Data Acquisition) - the storm chase group at Texas A&M.  I rewrote the group's rules and guidelines, and led a group of students on the first successful storm chase for TAMMSSDA by seeing a tornado near Cordell, OK on May 5, 2001.

  As a grad student, I enjoyed working on various research projects.  In 1997, I assisted in running the radar at Texas A&M during the TEFLUN-A project.  This research project involved an old U2 spy plane and our radar in order to calibrate and verify what the TRMM satellite (a weather satellite with radar to try and measure rainfall over the oceans) was detecting.  In 2000, I was a forecaster for the TexAQS 2000 study, which was focusing on ozone production in the Houston area. Now, I find myself back in the frozen tundra of Illinois. 

My current work is to try and improve upon the great work that Paul Sirvatka has done with the meteorology program at the College of DuPage.  In particular, I am working with Paul to improve student recruitment and awareness of our meteorology program.  I added a climate/climate change course to the curriculum a few years ago (ES 1111 - Climate and Global Change) to augment the fine collection of courses we offer.  In addition, I help the students by serving as an advisor to the College of DuPage Student Chapter of the American Meteorological Society . I highly encourage all students or prospective students to talk with me about their experience at the College of DuPage (what they enjoy, what we could improve, etc.) as well as their suggestions to make our program better!. 

  On a more personal level, I am the father of a wonderful son, Brandon, born on April 14, 2005 and I am married to my beautiful wife, Larisa. My mother and father are both alive and doing well, and I have one brother who works as a lawyer with Allstate.  He and his wife, Katerina, have a wonderful baby boy named Zeric who was born on June 6, 2004.

  Once again, I highly encourage students (and members of the community as well) to speak with me about the College of DuPage and the meteorology program here!  A link to my e-mail address is below.

   Thanks for reading!

   Karl
December 1, 2006