Dr. Greg Husak, a UCSB Researcher in UCSB Geography’s Climate Hazard Group, comes across as a fortyish, quiet, and soft spoken guy, but there’s a more flamboyant side to him. “Hollywood” Husak has won three national championships playing ultimate frisbee with the UC Santa Barbara Black Tide and the San Francisco Jam, a world championship with the Santa Barbara Condors, and, just recently, a gold medal with the U.S. Open Master team in this year’s World Championships of Beach Ultimate in Dubai.
As for the nickname “Hollywood,” Greg got that in college because he was a “hunk” from southern California, was (and remains) a star in ultimate frisbee, and had a personality some described as “flamboyant and a bit overconfident” in his early days.
What’s ultimate frisbee, you ask? Often simply referred to as “ultimate,” it’s a five-against-five game with unlimited substitutions, sort of a cross between basketball and water polo, that is played on a 75-metre by 25-metre field. The object is to move the frisbee to a teammate in the end zone – when a player takes possession of the frisbee he/she cannot run with it but can pivot on one leg to throw it on, and there are no restrictions on how many passes a team can make or in what direction. The team that reaches 13 points, or is leading after 45 minutes, wins the match.
The activities of the other Husak, “Humanitarian Husak,” “center on the remote monitoring of rainfall and cropped area to estimate food production in the developing world. As part of this, I administer a large grant supporting graduate students, researchers, and field scientists performing activities related to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. As principal investigator for this project, I have been in charge of writing proposals, designing and managing budgets, and setting scientific agendas. This work is based on my PhD, which was a statistical analysis of African rainfall, and my Masters research which analyzed the spatial accuracy of a global land cover map” (source).
Editor’s note: Much of material above was taken from ultiworld.com and wcbu2015.org; also see photos for pictures of the 2015 U.S. Open Masters Team and Wikipedia for more about the sport. Many thanks to Research Support staffer Pete Peterson for providing these links and updates during the tournament.
