Matthew A. Lazzara

Dr. Matthew A. Lazzara is a Senior Scientist and Research Meteorologist at the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center (AMRDC), Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison). He currently serves as the Principal Investigator of the Antarctic Automatic Weather Station Program and Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data. At the AMRDC, Lazzara supports and maintains the generation and archiving of Antarctic weather data, including Antarctic satellite composite images and the network of Automatic Weather Station (AWS) data collected across Antarctica. Additionally, he investigates meteorological phenomena in the Antarctic and conducts educational outreach activities with schools and organizations. He has worked on-site at McMurdo Station, Antarctica with 10 deployments from 1995 to the present.

Matthew Lazzara is a Weather and Climate faculty member and Chair of the Department of Physical Sciences in the School of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at Madison Area Technical College. There, he teaches courses in weather and climate, weather and climate laboratory, climate and climate change, and aviation meteorology, along with internships, honors meteorology projects, and independent studies.

As a Research Specialist at SSEC from 1991 to 1999, Lazzara supported users, tested software, and trained and demonstrated SSEC’s Man computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS). He previously served as Chairman of the McIDAS Advisory Committee, coordinating input from the McIDAS Users Group to the McIDAS project.

Matthew Lazzara earned his B.S. in Meteorology with minors in Mathematics and Physics from Lyndon State College (LSC) (now Vermont State University – Lyndon) in 1991. While at LSC, Lazzara organized weather data for an electronic weather bulletin board, maintained the school’s meteorology lab, served as a weather intern at WLNE Channel 6 in Providence, RI, and worked at WWLR FM radio in Lyndonville, Vermont. He also substitute-taught science at the King Philip Regional High School in Wrentham, MA during and after college.

Lazzara holds an M.S. in Atmospheric Science from UW–Madison, where his thesis focused on Atmospheric Predictability during the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere/Couple Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA/COARE). He earned a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences with a minor in Curriculum and Instruction from UW–Madison. This thesis research focused on a diagnostic study of Antarctic fog.

Lazzara is an active member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) including the AMS Board of Higher Education and 2-Year College Working Group, Mount Washington Observatory, American Geophysical Union, and Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Expert Group on Operational Meteorology in the Antarctic. He currently serves as President and past Secretary of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology, which is part of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences/International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.