Ryan Wade, a doctoral candidate from the Mississippi Gulf coast who is in Alabama studying snowstorms, has been named the top graduate research assistant in The University of Alabama in Huntsville's College of Science for 2014. While his dissertation research is in profiling winter storms, the UAH severe weather and radar group where he is based is more of an "all hands on deck" group when there is severe and hazardous weather to be studied, he said. Since arriving at UAH in 2009, Wade has tracked and studied snow storms from the Great Lakes to New Market, set up instrumentation and gathered data from hurricanes, and helped gather and analyze data on several severe weather events, including the April 27, 2011, tornado outbreak.