Dr. Branstator's research interests have focused on problems in large scale atmospheric dynamics, and recently on the predictability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system. His work has helped shape the framework used by the scientific community to characterize the processes that organize midlatitude tropospheric variability on monthly and longer timescales. These include the influence of land-sea contrasts, the synoptic eddies and tropical sea surface temperature anomalies. He has contributed to the identification of prominent intrinsic modes of variability of the atmosphere, and he has helped demonstrate the merits of applying quasi-linear models, stochastic methods, the fluctuation dissipation theorem, and analog techniques to various problems of interest.