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Mark Cane, who was honored in 2014 as a Fellow of The Oceanography Society, is the G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, based at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1965 and his PhD from MIT in 1975. He moved to Lamont in 1985 and has made his research home there ever since. His unusual career has ranged from theoretical equatorial ocean dynamics to studying links between climate variability and social conflict. In all cases, he has applied his piercing intellect, deep intuition, and methodological rigor to make major advances in understanding of the ocean, the climate system, and how climate variability and change impact human society. In particular, Mark Cane is a founding father of seasonal-to-interannual climate prediction, a revolutionary field in ocean and climate science.