No DeKalb weather system has snuck past Mace Bentley since he started teaching at NIU in 2000.

Bentley, an assistant geography professor, never dreamed of being a firefighter or running the bases on a professional baseball field growing up. Instead, his love was the weather.

“Actually, I’ve wanted to be a meteorologist since I was about 8 years old; when lightning hit really close to our house, that was the turning point,” Bentley said. “I always had a fascination with weather, storms especially.”

Bentley isn’t afraid of severe storms, either; he even took part in chasing storms and tornadoes while he was going after his graduate degree in Nebraska.

Storm chasers are nothing like those in the movie, Bentley said.

“Those films about severe weather are typically not scientific at all, and it does cause some problems if people don’t view them as just a movie,” Bentley said.

During his chases, he never saw but did manage to get in some dangerous situations.

“I’ve been caught in some pretty hairy situations, not necessarily with a tornado, but with some storms that were producing some really strong straight-line winds,” he said. “I would go storm chasing again, but I’m just lazy now; a lot of my students will drive hundreds of miles to follow a storm.”

Bentley worked for The Weather Channel off camera and at a television station in Ohio before he began teaching at NIU, but said he enjoys teaching too much to go back and do television.

At The Weather Channel, Bentley was in charge of doing the meteorology reports and briefing the on-camera talent, making it appear sometimes that they did all the work.

“They would get all the credit and money, but they were nice,” he said. “It would bother us sometimes, but on occasion they would thank us on-camera for our work and that was nice.”

In case you were wondering, Mace Bentley is his real name. But don’t worry: Others have wondered about the origin of his name too, Bentley said.

“I’ve had a lot of people since I have worked in media say my name is perfect for on air,” he said. “But it is the name my parents gave me. I did not come up with it.”

Associate geography professor David Changnon said anyone who gets a doctorate degree in meteorology has to have a passion for it because of all the work and extra math classes that need to be taken to go into it.

“Mace is a great researcher and has written a lot of interesting pieces on severe weather,” Changnon said. “We are having a lot of fun right now in the meteorology department.”

Despite being so involved in meteorology, Bentley tried to get away from the field in college, originally going for a degree in engineering.

“I realized that I had to do something that I loved, and that was meteorology,” Bentley said.

Bentley tries to transfer his passion for weather to the students in his classes.

“I find it a challenge and rewarding at the same time,” he said. “It is really fun when you can see the light bulbs come on in your students.”