Ángel F. Adames Corraliza is a Puerto Rican-American atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on tropical meteorology, climate dynamics, and large-scale interactions between moisture and convection. He is the Ned P. Smith Distinguished Chair of Climatology in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2025, Adames Corraliza was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Education Adames Corraliza earned his Bachelor of Science degree in physics, summa cum laude, from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in 2010. He completed both his Master of Science in 2013 and Doctor of Philosophy in 2016 degrees in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Career After completing his doctorate, Adames Corraliza was a visiting postdoctoral scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 2016 to 2018. He joined the University of Michigan in 2018 as an assistant professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, where he was also a faculty associate in the Latina/o Studies Program within the Department of American Culture.
In 2020, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor in atmospheric and oceanic sciences. He became an associate professor in 2024 and currently holds the Ned P. Smith Distinguished Chair of Climatology.
Research Adames Corraliza's research examines the dynamics of tropical weather systems, including the Madden–Julian oscillation, tropical easterly waves, and the coupling between moisture, convection, and atmospheric circulation. He has contributed to the development of moisture mode theory, which describes large-scale tropical variability driven by moisture–convection interactions.
He has served as associate editor for the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems and previously for Monthly Weather Review.
Honors and awards 2025 – MacArthur Fellow 2024 – Phillip R. Certain-Gary D. Sandefur Distinguished Faculty Award, University of Wisconsin–Madison 2023 – National Science Foundation CAREER Award 2022 – Exceptional Service Award, Office of the Provost, University of Wisconsin–Madison 2019 – Kavli Fellow, National Academy of Sciences 2018 – James R. Holton Award, American Geophysical Union
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