>> LISA: Here's a little background on me.
I live in a one bedroom apartment in Miami.
My husband, he works for the National Hurricane Center.
Say hi, Matt.
>> MATT: Hello.
>> LISA: He's also a Michigan alum.
>> MATT: Go blue.
>> LISA: And we have a two year old.
So if you see toys in the background
they are hers probably.
My name is Lisa Buchi.
I didn't know what I wanted to study.
So I took a tour of all the different departments.
And while I was touring
I saw a presentation by Dr. Perry Sampson
and he was talking about meteorology and atmospheric science
and I had always been interested in the weather
but I always thought that meteorologists
were just TV meteorologists
'cause that's what everybody said,
"Oh, you wanna be my meteorologist
you wanna be on TV?"
And I was like, no. >> JORDAN: Not really.
>> LISA: 'Cause I didn't want to talk to anyone.
[laughing]
I graduated, I got a master's degree in meteorology
from Florida State University.
and I applied for a job in Miami
with NOAA the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration.
It turns out that the job
that I was applying for I thought it was gonna be
like a programming meteorologists.
So combining a meteorology background
and my engineering background.
And it turns out that they also fly into hurricanes.
So I applied to be a programming meteorologist
and became a hurricane hunters.
[laughing]
>> JORDAN: Or like is it a very risky situation?
Or is it more so it's very calculated
and so it's not really too high risk.
>> LISA: [laughing] I'm not that much of a Ninja Junkie.
The majority of my time I spend in front of a computer,
I'm studying data that we've collected,
we run weather models, and we get on these aircraft.
There's a P3 and G4 so that there's a jet and then a plane.
Like a big four propeller engine plane.
We fly into or around hurricanes to collect observations.
And we use these planes kind of like our laboratories,
we have a few instruments that we always fly into the storm,
a couple radars.
And the big one is this radar
that sits at the back of our plane is called
the tail Doppler radar.
And so it's sort of like one
that would be on the ground,
as if we have it on the back of our plane.
And it's scanning and it's kinda giving
this CAT scan of the hurricane.
So you get a picture of where all the rain is happening.
And with that, we can tell what the winds are.
My first really big storm was Hurricane Sandy.
So that was kind of crazy
because we're out there collecting data,
we're sending it off.
It's headed up the East Coast towards New Jersey in New York
and at one point the pilots came over at the headset
and they were like,
"Hey, if you get a chance,
"if you see a ship,
"we got a report that a ship is sinking.
"So if you can, if you see it,
"just let us know."
I was like, "Wait, what somebody out here right now?"
So I didn't see anything
but they used our data to help find them,
which is pretty crazy.
Since then I've gone into Hurricane Matthew,
Hurricane Irma was one of really big one.
And then the strongest storm that I've flown in
was Hurricane Lane.
So it was a category five that was approaching Hawaii.
And that was the craziest storm I've ever seen.
We can't totally automate this process.
So we have actual meteorologist looking at the data,
making sure that everything is correct.
And taking out any bad data
that we don't want sent off the plane.
Our data is public,
anybody can look at it
you can go on a website and look at our data.
Friends message me while I'm on the plane
And they're like, "I can see your data coming in."
[laughing]
>> JORDAN: That is so cool.
How did the classes you took
or the experiences that you took advantage
of while at Michigan kind of prepare you
or maybe not prepare you for what you're currently doing?
>> LISA: The classes were great,
the professors were really well connected.
So they helped connect me with people
in my future careers, right?
They helped in like give me opportunities
to try small, research projects.
Part of the reason that I really started to fall into love
with field work is because we had a summer program,
we teamed up with Texas Tech University
and they took us Storm Chasing for tornadoes.
So that's kind of where I fell in love field work.
And that all happened at Michigan.
So I got to actually see the weather that we were studying
in the classroom in front of me and develop
and they could point out all the different aspects
of what was happening and why it was happening
and why maybe one storm would form and one wouldn't?
And I was like, "Wow, this is really cool.
"We should do this all the time."
>> JORDAN: Is there any message specific to women in engineering
that you'd like to provide or highlight?
>> LISA: Yeah, stick with it.
We need you.
I need you to come join me in the workforce, like please.
[laughing]
You bring a new perspective, right?
And that's what's really important about science.
You need to keep looking at it from different perspectives.
So you have a unique perspective and we need to know
what it is so we can keep getting better
at what we're trying to do,
which in my case
is forecasting hurricanes. [giggling]