Riehl and Silva Dias 2026 awards announced

Each spring, our department awards the Herbert Riehl Memorial Award and the Maria Silva Dias Award to — typically two — students nominated by their advisers for outstanding research. This year, three students received awards because the nominees were so strong.

Lena Low and Delián Colón-Burgos both won the won the Riehl Award for an outstanding technical manuscript by a master’s student. The award is named in honor of department founder Herbert Riehl.

Low’s manuscript, “Spatiotemporal variations and source apportionment of volatile organic compounds and air toxins in Northern Colorado,” includes collaborators from the National Park Service Aur Resources Division. 

Colón-Burgos’ manuscript, “Convective organization in African Easterly waves observed during the NAMMA and CPEX-CV field campaigns,” was published in Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. 

Charles Davis won the Silva Dias award for outstanding research by a Ph.D student. The Silva Dias Award is given in recognition of outstanding research. Previously known as the Alumni Award, through a student-led initiative it was re-named for alumna Maria Silva Dias. Silva Dias, the department’s first woman Ph.D. graduate.

Davis, advised by University Distinguished Professor Susan van den Heever, used innovative research approaches to find a previously unrecognized air transport pathway with important implications for storm dynamics, aerosol-cloud interactions and bioaerosol transport. His manuscript is titled, “The Entrainment of air from rainy surface regions and its implications for bioaerosol transport in three deep convective storm morphologies.”  

Photos: not pictured, Colón-Burgos. She was at a conference and will present her research at a future date.