Storming the Tiger Twelve: Meet CC&E’s newest member of the prestigious group

From weather-watching as a child to polishing off a Bachelor’s degree, Jonathan Russell is well on his way to completing his dream of becoming a meteorologist. And, through internships and research, he’s gotten a few things done along the way. 

The latest? Being named one of the Tiger Twelve, one of the most prestigious honors given to undergraduates at LSU. 

Now he’s graduating and moving on to his next adventure – a PhD in meteorology, at the University of Georgia. 

Russell is receiving his Bachelor's in Coastal Environmental Science, with a concentration in Coastal Meteorology. He says the things he learned during this degree deepened his understanding the importance of meteorology, and how it can directly benefit people and communities. 

“It's always been a passion, but it actually has a direct impact on people's daily lives. So regardless of the work I want, there's still a feeling I will have an overall impact, helping people, as I move through into the future.”

His work in coastal meteorology dispelled for him the notion that the discipline is just a weather man, predicting rain. 

“All these different systems are interacting with each other and have an influence upon each other… If it rains, then that rain then has impacts upon the economy in terms of whether or not farms go into drought. And if that drought then is affected, then you can have more induced thunderstorms. All these interconnected systems ultimately have other impacts on people.”

His biggest accomplishment during his time at CC&E is related to that – the Gulf hurricane forecast he developed with DOCS Associate Professor Paul Miller.

“It was a big motivator for me. I was just coming off my freshman year, and [I had] a lot of imposter syndrome. Dr. Rohli helped a lot with that. He set me up to do some research. Paul Miller had heard about it, and he was like, we should do something together, and then LSU picks it up, and they’re like, oh, this is really cool. It was very encouraging.”

Another big achievement? Making the Tiger Twelve.

“They’re all a great group of people. It’s funny, because everyone ends up knowing each other, indirectly. Three of them, we had gone on the Global Ambassadors trip. Four of them were in my freshman leadership group. So it's a really cool moment of okay, everybody knows each other as well, but they're all really accomplished in their own fields, which I think is kind of the neat part about it. Everybody is contributing to different realms.”

Russell’s other accomplishments aren’t small. He came to LSU as a Honors College STAMPS scholar, and almost immediately began to pursue his dream of a career in meteorology. In addition to coursework, the list of his accomplishments is long: he built the hurricane model as part of an internship with the insurance company Velocity Risk.  He completed a research project on tornadogenesis with DOCS Professor Robert Rohli, and also finished two more internships, working on compound flooding with the Water Institute and coastal resilience with the state of Louisiana.