Professor Gudrun Magnusdottir got her BS in Physics from the University of Iceland, her MS in atmospheric science from Colorado State University following which she worked as a meteorologist in the Icelandic Meteorological Office. She returned to Colorado State University for a PhD. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge. She joined the University of California Irvine in 1995, the year in which the program in Geoscience became the Department of Earth System Science (ESS). She currently serves as Chair of ESS.