JANUS Team Member Marikate Mountain Celebrates 15 Years
05/31/2025
Staff Scientist II Marikate Mountain is celebrating 15 years with JANUS Research Group (JANUS) in June, by way of JANUS' recent acquisition of AER.
Marikate began her career in a technical support role for mesoscale modeling, evolving over time to Senior Research Associate and her current role as a Staff Scientist II with JANUS. Marikate has managed projects in support of NOAA's CarbonTracker-Lagrange (CT-L) efforts, encompassing technical oversight, execution, and client relations. She now works independently on larger greenhouse gas, meteorology, and air quality projects.
As part of a team that did a thorough study of urban trace gas dispersion modeling, Marikate contributed to an oft-cited paper that also laid the groundwork for multiple research projects involving the coupled WRF-STILT (Weather Research and Forecasting - Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport) modeling framework. These projects resulted in high-profile publications coauthored by Marikate and published in prestigious scientific journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Marikate's work with WRF-STILT led her to develop and maintain a system for performing a very large number of computations which form the basis of the "footprint library" maintained by NOAA and used by the larger research community for trace gas modeling and emission monitoring.
In addition, Marikate has worked on projects determining methane emissions in Boston and Los Angeles with WRF-STILT and other support projects for the NOAA Global Monitoring Lab and NASA Carbon Cycle Science program. She also contributed to an Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) paper examining the potential role of a proposed constellation of GPS satellites for remote sensing of the atmosphere. Throughout her career Marikate has contributed to many publications, helping to solidify the company's standing in the scientific community.
Marikate's achievements have been acknowledged with AER "Outstanding Team Service" awards for her work with the Greenhouse Gas Team in 2013 and her work with the Air Quality Initiative Team in 2015.
More recently, Marikate has delved into one of her greatest career challenges so far. She completed her first grant proposal as the principal investigator (PI) last fall. These are difficult undertakings, requiring 15-20 pages of scientific text, including hypotheses and planned results, with tight deadlines for submission. The proposal writer must take vast amounts of data, pull together an idea, and translate it into a scientific plan in a very short amount of time. As usual, Marikate excelled and with the lessons she learned improved upon her process when she wrote her second proposal a few months later. With her signature attention to detail and dedication to her work, Marikate succeeds at any project she takes on, creating solutions that translate into successful applications for her clients.
When not hard at work, Marikate enjoys spending time with her husband, her three boys, and her dog. They keep her very busy, but hopefully not too busy to enjoy expanding her knowledge base on wines. While at Cornell, Marikate had the opportunity to participate in a wine-tasting course.
JANUS is pleased to raise a glass to Marikate's 15th work anniversary and we look forward to her many contributions and accomplishments to come in the years ahead.
