James C. McWilliams is a preeminent scholar in geophysical fluid dynamics and a leading authority in oceanic and atmospheric modeling systems. He currently serves as the Louis B. Slichter Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA. Born in Oklahoma City and raised in Tulsa, he earned his B.S. in Applied Mathematics with honors from Caltech in 1968 before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard University, where he completed both his M.S. in 1969 and Ph.D. in 1971. Following his doctoral work on The Boundary Layer Dynamics of Symmetric Vortices under advisor George F. Carrier, he held a Research Fellowship in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at Harvard from 1971 to 1974 before joining the National Center for Atmospheric Research where he rose to Senior Scientist by 1980.
Professor McWilliams has made seminal contributions to the computational modeling of Earth's oceans and atmospheres, fundamentally advancing our understanding of geophysical fluid dynamics. His most influential work, the 1990 paper Isopycnal Mixing in Ocean Circulation Models co-authored with Peter Gent, introduced a groundbreaking subgrid-scale parameterization for mesoscale eddy mixing that revolutionized non-eddy resolving ocean models and became widely adopted across the field. He has authored the authoritative textbook Fundamentals of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics which has become essential reading for graduate students and researchers with intermediate to advanced knowledge of physics and Earth's fluid environment. His research spans critical areas including the maintenance of general circulations, climate dynamics, geostrophically balanced dynamics in rotating stratified fluids, and the roles of coherent structures in turbulent flows within geophysical regimes.
Beyond his research, McWilliams has shaped the field through his leadership in scientific organizations and his dedication to education and mentorship. He has taught graduate courses including Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Introduction to Ocean Science, and Atmospheric and Oceanic Turbulence, training generations of scientists in the theoretical and computational foundations of the field. His exceptional contributions have been recognized with election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, Fellowship in the American Geophysical Union in 2001, and the Editor's Award from the American Meteorological Society in 2015. Currently, he continues to advance coastal ocean modeling through the development of sophisticated three-dimensional simulation models of the U.S. West Coast that integrate physical oceanographic, biogeochemical, and sediment transport processes to interpret coastal phenomena and assess future environmental changes.
