After a long, strange trip, Steve Finley retires from CIRA
You’ve probably seen him wearing camo on Fridays. He’s the man of many nicknames: ‘Hurl’, ‘Finner’, ‘Cheevers’. Some even call him ‘Ravenfeeder’ (but you have to ask him about that one.) Officemates compared him to the ‘Terry Tate: Office Linebacker’ character.
He’s been maintaining CIRA’s computer systems since October 2009 – before that, he had a long and varied career in private industry, working with forecast models (remember RAMS?), email archival systems, and more. He’s a private pilot, an avid outdoorsman, an advocate for club soccer, noon-hour weightlifting, and the vaunted ATS softball teams, one heck of a band roadie and occasional vocalist…and this Friday, May 2nd, will be his last day at CIRA.
Steve Finley came to Fort Collins in December of 1990 by way of Iowa State University, where he earned his M.S. in Agricultural Meteorology. His career in Colorado started in the Department of Atmospheric Science as the departmental computing, network, and weather lab administrator. Stints with then-new faculty, including now-University Distinguished Professor Sonia Kreidenweis and recent ATS Department Head Jeff Collett were included.
Finley even honed his teaching chops TAing the weather lab course in ATS (continuing his teaching experience from ISU.) University Distinguished Professor Sue van den Heever and CIRA researcher Lixin Lu were some of his students as he recalls. But it was his partnership with ATS researcher Bill Thorson that would help shape much of his career to come.
Leaving ATS in 1997, Finley worked for an aviation software company in Boulder, an FAA contractor. Reuniting with Thorson at Mission Research Corporation, Finley ran a version of the RAMS model for DoD missions, requiring security clearances and frequent DC travel.
Mission Research Corporation was folded into defense contractor ATK in the meantime; in 2005, Finley again left to work with Thorson at Privacy Networks. Stints with consulting and other work eventually led Finley back to CSU, completing the career-go-round in 2009 when he started working with CIRA.
Finley’s long career at CSU has seen him rubbing elbows with many CSU and CIRA notables; on a soccer team run by CIRA researcher Ian Baker, Finley played with former CIRA director Graeme Stephens as a teammate, along with CIRA researcher Phil Partain, current CIRA director Steve Miller, and NOAA scientist John Knaff.
Besides van den Heever, Lu, Knaff, Baker, Miller, and Partain, Finley remembers the student careers of Professor and State Climatologist Russ Schumacher, ATS graduate and current Max Planck director Bjorn Stevens, CIRA IT head Natalie Tourville (and of course, yours truly, along with many others.)
Regarding his experience working with students and researchers, Finley notes “the best undergraduates are the ones who ask questions. The best graduate students are the ones who learn the tools and methods to answer questions. And the best PhDs are the ones who constantly question the answers – especially their own.”
And whether it’s his solid presence keeping CIRA running, his friendly smile on ‘Camo Friday’, or his many contributions to research at ATS and CIRA, his presence here at CIRA will be missed.
