Dr. Luciana Pires is a Fluid Dynamicist researcher. In 2015 she began to direct major part of her career towards the problem of climate change. In 2017 she founded the World Environmental Conservancy, Inc. where she oversees the principal programs of the organization which include protection of environmentally sensitive forested areas in North and South American, environmental education, and global meteorology research focusing on the Antarctic, Amazon and Mata Atlantica Forests.
She networks with distinguished scientists around the world, having lived, studied and worked in Germany, the UK and the USA in addition to her home country of Brazil; she has participated in research development meetings sponsored by the NSF (National Science Foundation of the USA) at universities and ministries in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia; she has delivered academic presentations in several other countries including Portugal, Italy, Austria, Peru and Switzerland. She has over 22 years of experience in research involving engineering and geophysics fluid mechanics as well as atmospheric boundary layers, turbulence and their applications to complex terrain and continent-ocean interactions. She received the 2010 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award in Geophysics from CAPES (Agency for the Coordination and Support of Graduate Education of the Ministry of Education in Brazil), for her work, “Study of the internal boundary layer downwind of coastal cliffs with application to the Brazilian Launching Center of Alcântara”, conducted at INPE (Brazilian National Institute for Space Research) 2004-2009.
She has had the opportunity to utilize state-of-the-art technologies such as PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) and HWA (Hot Wire Anemometer) for measurements in wind tunnels and analysis of data from anemometric towers, as well as to use radiossondes, satellite images, and DNS (Direct Numerical Simulation), Large Eddy Simulation (LES) etc. She has applied this background and expertise to studies of wind and marine energy generation, aerospace meteorology, and micrometeorology in the Alcantara Launching Center, as well as the Amazon, the northeast and southeast of Brazil regions, and Antarctic.
She grew up in Minas Gerais, Brazil, received her Ph.D. in Meteorology, with emphasis in Geophysical Fluid Mechanics, from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil, 2009. Additionally, she completed her first year of a doctoral program in Engineering Mechanics, with emphasis in Aeronautics, at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. Her first postdoctoral research appointment was conducted at the Laboratory for Environmental Physics at the Center for Atmospheric Biogeosciences of the University of Georgia (UGA), USA. Beginning January 2013, she spent 3 months at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a visiting scientist at the Center for Climate Science of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Her second postdoctoral research appointment was completed at the School of Engineering at Cardiff University, UK, in the Hydro-environmental Research Centre (HRC), in 2014.
