Halaby Fellow 2015

Halaby Fellowship: A tribute to Najeeb Halaby’s legacy that builds on his contributions to aviation meteorology.

Manuela Sauer was the inaugural Halaby Fellow in 2015.  She is a dynamic researcher from Germany and visited NCAR from November 2015 to February 2016.  Manuela started focusing on aviation meteorology in her Master program at the Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH), Germany.  During her Master project she worked at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Brunswig, Germany and implemented winter weather operations in a fast time simulation of Frankfurt/Main airport.  Following this, Manuela was a PhD student in the SESAR (the European counterpart to NextGen) WP-E ComplexWorld network.  While working at LUH at this time, she developed and applied a flight trajectory calculation tool to study horizontal thunderstorm avoidance effects and the impact of forecast uncertainty on aircraft routing.  

During her stay at NCAR as Halaby Fellow Manuela included multiple hazards, such as turbulence and icing among convection, in her studies and evaluated their impact on routing solutions.  After finishing her PhD in late 2015 she got the opportunity to intensify these studies on multi-hazard avoidance as an ASP postdoc at NCAR and is now working on 3D weather hazard avoidance routing simulations. After leaving NCAR, Manuela worked for Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation in Lucerne, Switzerland, as a Research Scientist.  In May 2022, she joined Axalp Technologies as a Scientific Researcher and Meteorologist. Check out her LinkedIn profile.