Timothy P. Marshall - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Tim Marshall was born in Evergreen Park near Chicago, Illinois, in 1956 and raised in Oak Lawn, then in Oak Brook. Oak Lawn was heavily damaged during the historic 1967 Oak Lawn tornado outbreak of April 21, 1967, when he was 10 years old. The F4 "Oak Lawn tornado" touched down about four miles (6.4 km) west of his family's home and killed 33 in town, including some of his classmates. This experience served to strengthen his interest in meteorology, and he focused his studies on tornadoes.

Tim attended Northern Illinois University at DeKalb, attaining a B.S. degree majoring in meteorology in 1978. As an undergraduate student there, he and classmates surveyed some tornado damage paths of the 1974 Super Outbreak during informal travels to the National Climatic Data Center to collect severe weather data.

Marshall went to Texas for graduate school, seeing his first tornado a few hours after entering the state. In 1978, he began storm chasing in west Texas and Oklahoma. In 1980, he earned a M.S. degree majoring in atmospheric sciences from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, then went on to earn an M.S. degree in civil engineering from the same university. There, Tim worked part-time at the Institute for Disaster Research where he began surveying tornado and hurricane damage. His first official tornado damage survey was in Grand Island, Nebraska, in 1980 and his first hurricane damage survey was Hurricane Allen in south Texas later that same year.