Contact: Carl Smith

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Hannah Strong, a Mississippi State geosciences graduate and meteorologist for WDRB in Louisville, Kentucky, recently helped her station bring home three Ohio Valley Regional Emmy Awards.

Strong won the regional Emmy for best meteorologist and was part of the station team that won awards for best newscast and coverage of a tornadic weather outbreak. In all, the station and its journalists won 16 awards.

Strong, who started her undergraduate studies on a path to becoming an engineer, credited her former professors—including MSU Department of Geosciences Professor Mike Brown, Instructor Lindsey Poe and former Instructor Renny Vandewege—and the MSU Career Center for introducing her to a field she would come to love and readying her for life after graduation.

“MSU helped prepare me to get a job right out of college, to handle the weird things that get thrown at me in this business and to do so with grace and kindness. That’s one of the greatest things about my MSU education—I was well prepared to start my career and to be a well-rounded person,” said the Birmingham, Alabama, native. “In my experience, it’s about more than just classes at MSU; it’s about living life well.”

In 2015, Strong graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in geosciences and a concentration in professional meteorology. She joined WDRB in 2017 after beginning her career in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Strong holds the Certified Broadcast Meteorologist accreditation from the American Meteorological Society and a National Weather Association Seal of Approval, and she serves on the NWA Board of Directors, NWA Social Media Committee and the AMS Broadcast Board. 

Approximately one in three of today’s on-air broadcast meteorologists is a graduate of the university’s nationally recognized meteorology program.

Visit www.geosciences.msstate.edu/undergraduate/meteorology to learn more about the MSU Department of Geosciences’ professional meteorology and broadcast meteorology concentrations. For more information about the department, visit www.geosciences.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.