Noah Fierer, PhD
Noah Fierer is a professor in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EBIO) department, a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and the Director of the Center for Microbial Exploration at the University of Colorado.
Dr. Fierer’s work explores the distribution and roles of microorganisms in diverse environments and the relevance of microbes to the health and function of ecosystems, plants, and animals.
Daniel Breecker, PhD
Daniel Breecker is a Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences professor at the University of Texas - Austin.
Dr. Breecker studies biogeochemical processes occurring at or near the land surface on timescales ranging from seasonal cycles to hundreds of millions of years.
Jennifer Pett-Ridge, PhD
Jennifer Pett-Ridge is a distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Physical and Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the Director and Lead Scientist of LLNL Carbon Initiative, Principal Investigator of DOE Soil Microbiome SFA “Microbes Persist “ and DOE Energy Earthshot Research Center “Terraforming Soil”, Adjunct Full Professor in the Life & Environmental Sciences Department at UC Merced, and Investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Pett-Ridge studies climate change effects on soil biogeochemistry and environmental microbial communities, and the role of microbial ecophysiology, redox, and rhizosphere plant-microbe-mineral interactions in shaping soil carbon persistence. She also recently led "Roads to Removal", a national county-level assessment of carbon dioxide removal capacity and costs in the USA.
Bernardo González, PhD
Bernardo González is a professor of bioengineering at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile and an expert in environmental microbiology.
Dr. González’ research combines disciplines such as environmental microbiology, microbial biotechnology, and plant-microbe interactions to study the beneficial interactions between plants and microbes.
Kazem Zamanian, PhD
Kazem Zamanian is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Earth System Sciences, Section Soil Science, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany, and a leading expert on the impact of agriculture, including fertilizer use, on the dynamics and stability of soil inorganic carbon.
Dr. Zamanian’s research focuses on the role of soil inorganic carbon in global warming via regulating the concentration of atmospheric CO₂, and the impact of human interventions through land use and management on soil inorganic carbon.
Jerry Hatfield, PhD
Jerry Hatfield is a retired USDA Director with a PhD in agricultural climatology from Iowa State University and over 45 years of experience.
Dr. Hatfield's research interests center around the interactions among the components of the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum and their linkage to air, water, and soil quality. His focus has been on evaluating farming systems and their response to water and nitrogen interactions across soils and evaluating remote sensing methods to quantify spatial variation within fields for application to risk management tools.