Congratulations to Dr Feng Zhu, who today successfully defended his dissertation Seeing the Future through the Lens of the Past: Fusing Paleoclimate Observations and Models. At USC, Feng (whom I must get used to calling Dr Zhu) published 2 papers as first author, one in PNAS, one in GRL. with another manuscript in revision at Nature Communications. Feng was also a sought-after co-author, contributing notably to the highly-cited Neukom et al [2019] paper on global temperature reconstructions and a book chapter on ENSO. In his 5 years at USC, Feng has made enormous contributions to many Python packages, coming up with an intuitive way to perform paleoclimate data assimilation, proxy system modeling, or paleoclimate reconstruction with GraphEM, and has been a lead contributor to Pyleoclim. Dr Zhu is now an assistant professor at the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in his native China, and we wish him the best for what is likely to be an astonishingly productive career!