From the National Weather Service Facebook page:
Dr. Russell Schneider named as new Storm Prediction Center director. Schneider spent his entire career at the National Weather Service. He
began at NCEP’s Environmental Modeling Center before becoming the first science and operations officer at the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center. He has been the science support …branch chief at SPC in Norman, Okla., since 1997. Author and co-author of numerous professional publications, Schneider also served as an associate editor of the American Meteorological Society Journal “Weather and Forecasting” for more than a decade.
In June 2004, BAMS published a brief interview with Russ Schneider by Ashton Robinson-Cook. Schneider recalled that his interest in meteorology was ignited as a youngster–a situation surely familiar to many AMS members. In particular 1965, when he was seven years old, the weather brought two pivotal storms to Chicago: an inch-thick icing in the winter, followed by the Palm Sunday outbreak in which an F4 struck within 10 miles of Schneider’s home.
That was a pretty intense start, which led to a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a long career with the weather service serving the intersection of research and operations. He told Robinson-Cook,
I think the ability to use science to warn people of the threat of severe weather hazards is what my commitment (and many others in atmospheric science) is all about.
Congratulations on taking that attitude to the next step.