Rajul Pandya is the director and principal investigator of the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) Program.

SOARS is a multifaceted, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, science research and learning community at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, CO. The program was awarded the 2001 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring under the guidance of previous director Tom Windham.

Rajul assumed leadership of SOARS in February 2004, bringing with him a demonstrated commitment to diversity. He worked closely with SOARS proteges in his previous position at UCAR, Outreach and Community Relations Liaison for DLESE, the Digital Library for Earth System Education. He mentored a protege in writing and included proteges in DLESE's annual conference. Rajul also strove to include environmental racism and other ethical issues in the library, and he has consistently discussed the issues of diversity and equity in the leadership positions he has held.

Rajul grew up in the diverse but segregated city of Rockford, Illinois, the child of an Indian father and Belgian mother. He rarely experienced discrimination himself, Rajul said, but watched his father struggle with it at times. His father was denied access to a restaurant, for example, and Rajul's parents were asked to give up teaching a Sunday school class after presenting a picture of an interracial couple during a discussion of family. Many church parents did not approve of the image showing a black man and a white woman. Rajul's family left the church.

"By the time I was a kid, though, Indian Americans were considered model immigrants," Rajul said. Teachers often had high expectations of him.

Rajul graduated with distinction from the University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in physics and then received a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington. His advisor was Professor Dale Durran.

Rajul's scientific work has involved analytical and numerical modeling of convection and other atmospheric phenomena. For his Ph.D., he studied the influence of convectively-generated thermal forcing on the mesoscale circulation around squall lines. He continued his research as a postdoctorate fellow at the University of Washington and during a second postdoctoral fellowship at NCAR, and as an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

During his time at NCAR in the late 1990s, Rajul also served as a science mentor for a SOARS protege, and worked for the project Laboratory Experience in Atmospheric Research at NCAR (LEARN). At that point, he said, he began to think his future might lie in education rather than research. While serving as an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, he shifted his research toward investigating how visualizations and data could be best incorporated into undergraduate introductory atmospheric science classes.

Rajul holds numerous leadership positions in scientific and educational societies. He is an editorial board member of the American Meteorological Society, AMS, and serves on the AMS's Board of Pre-college Education and Outreach. Rajul sits on the steering committees of the Earth Evaluation Toolkit and the Electronic Environmental Education Library, and he consistently serves as a chair or co-chair of sessions at American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society meetings. He won NCAR's Outstanding Performance Award for Education in 1998, and has successfully earned scientific and educational grants to support his work.

Rajul and his wife live in Boulder with their daughter Maya, born in 2002. Rajul has memorized "Clifford the Red Dog," and can read it 12 times in a row without showing a trace of boredom.