NEON Selects Its Chief Executive Officer
| NEON, Inc. is pleased to announce that Dr. David Schimel, Senior Scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has been named CEO of NEON. Since 1992, Dr. Schimel has served as a terrestrial scientist in NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Division and as Founding co-Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. His career has focused on the large-scale relationships of land management and climate change on ecosystem processes and includes expertise in managing large, complex research projects, remote sensing, data management, modeling, and the application of ecological research to science policy development. |  |
Full Biographical Sketch
David Schimel is Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Senior Research Scientist and member of the Graduate Faculty at Colorado State University and was a Founding Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. He also serves as the Editor in Chief of Ecological Applications for the Ecological Society of America. His interests are in biogeochemistry, the global carbon cycle and carbon cycle processes, climate impacts on ecosystems and scaling ecological theory to the landscape and larger regions. His research has addressed plant-herbivore interactions, landscape and erosional controls over biogeochemistry, climate impacts on vegetation dynamics, soil processes and carbon budgets, and disturbance (cultivation and fire ) effects on ecosystem processes.
He has participated or led numerous field programs in the U.S. Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, Texas, Africa and Asia. Schimel was a participant in the FIFE project, the first of NASA's large land surface experiments and was responsible for the spatial sampling design of that study. Recently, Schimel recently led the pioneering Airborne Carbon in the Mountains study, the first attempt to make regional flux estimates in mountainous terrain. He is also known for his work in modeling and remote sensing, and has been a co-author of the Century model, a Principal Investigator in NASA's Earth Observing System, and a pioneer of the use of "data assimilation" modeling in ecology. Schimel served as the Project Scientist for the Climate Systems Modeling Project that led to the development of the NCAR Community Climate System Model. He has also been involved in applications of ecology for many years, beginning with early work on agroecology, serving three times as Convening Lead Author for the IPCC, and as a member of the US National Assessment Synthesis Team. He is currently co-Lead Author of the US Climate Change Science Program assessment report on Climate Impacts on U.S. Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services.
In recent years, Schimel has served on the NRC Ecosystem Panel, Committee on Global Change Research, Earth Science and Applications from Space Decadal Survey, Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data, NOAA's Carbon Cycle advisory committee, the World Climate Research Program's Modeling Panel and the NSF Geosciences Directorate Advisory Committee, amongst other advisory roles. Schimel has long played a role in the international arena, beginning with co-chairing the SCOPE project "Exchange of trace gases between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere" in the 1980s, through the present where he serves as Founding Co-Chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere's Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling of the Earth System core project. He is an elected member of the the Max-Planck Geselschaft and the International Ecology Institute. Schimel has been a faculty member at Colorado State University, and regularly teaches graduate institutes on atmosphere-biosphere interactions, modeling, and geographic information systems.
Schimel received his BA from Hampshire College in 1977, worked at the Marine Biological Lab's Ecosystems Center 1977-1979, and received his PhD from Colorado State University in 1982. Schimel is the author of 110 peer-reviewed articles and is an ISI Highly Cited author. He serves or has served on the Editorial Boards of Science Magazine, Global Change Biology, Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources, and Biogeochemistry. Schimel's current interests include field and modeling studies of climate change and Western US ecosystems, development of new modeling techniques for ecological systems, environmental history and communicating ecological science to decisionmakers, especially in the non-federal arena.
Posted by djohnson on Wednesday November 15, at 12PM.