Penn State professor Guido Cervone officially started his term as the president of the Natural Hazards section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), according to a release.

Established in 1919, the AGU is a non-profit organization that assists nearly 130,000 scientists in the world of earth and space sciences.

Cervone is a geography, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences professor in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and the associate director of the Penn State Institute of Computation and Data Sciences.

The professor was elected in January 2021, but his term officially started on January 1 of this year. He will serve as president of the AGU for the next two years.

Since 2004, Cervone has been a member of the AGU and served as co-chair of the Human Geosciences and Natural Hazards committees.

The Natural Hazards section is tasked with understanding geophysical hazards such as earthquakes, space weather, floods, and more.

“Every year several catastrophic natural hazards strike somewhere on Earth and cause deaths and damage to properties and to the environment,” Cervone said. “That is a fundamental challenge for the survival of our civilization.”

Cervone’s research specializes in analyzing the probability of extreme weather events and remote sensing.