Appendix B

Biographical Sketches of Organizing Committee Members

Bruno Basso (Chair) is an agroecosystem scientist and University Foundation Professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences and the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station at Michigan State University (MSU). Before joining MSU in 2012, he was a professor at the University of Basilicata in Italy. His research focuses on long-term sustainability of agricultural systems, digital agriculture, and dynamics of water, carbon, and nutrient fluxes across agricultural landscapes under current and future climates. He has pioneered the integration of crop modeling with remote sensing to understand and predict spatial and temporal variations of crop yield and environmental impacts in agroecosystems. He is a fellow of the Soil Science Society of America and the American Society of Agronomy. He is the 2016 recipient of the Innovation of the Year Award and the 2019 Outstanding Faculty Award at MSU and the recipient of the 2021 Morgan Stanley Sustainable Solutions Prize. He is ranked in the top 2 percent of scientists across all disciplines and is in the 0.006 percent in the field of agronomy, agriculture, and meteorology. He obtained his Ph.D. from MSU.

Ranveer Chandra is the chief scientist at Microsoft Azure Global and a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Chandra started the FarmBeats project at Microsoft in 2015, which aims to enable data-driven farming by getting data from the farm to the Cloud in conditions with no power or Internet connectivity by using low-cost sensors, drones, and vision and machine learning algorithms. He also leads the battery research project and the white space networking project at Microsoft Research. He has been invited to present his research on FarmBeats to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and on TV White Spaces to the Federal Communications Commission chairman. Dr. Chandra has published more than 90 research papers and has more than 100 patents that have been granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He has won several awards, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35. Dr. Chandra has a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University.

Alison Marklein is a quantitative biogeochemist who focuses on the effects of soil chemistry, climate change, and agricultural management on soil carbon storage and plant growth. Her past research has focused on how interactions between nitrogen and phosphorus affect terrestrial carbon sequestration and the dynamics of plants and microbes. She is currently a project scientist at the University of California, Riverside, and previously worked as a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Montana. She received her B.A. in computational biology from Cornell University in 2008 and her Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 2014. In addition to her research, Dr. Marklein is a science advisor for The ClimateMusic Project, an organization that translates climate data into music to inspire action and hope. Dr. Marklein also works on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in science as a member of the leadership board of 500 Women Scientists.

Charles W. Rice is a University Distinguished Professor of soil microbiology in the department of agronomy at Kansas State University. He conducts long-term research on soil organic dynamics, nitrogen transformations, and microbial ecology. Recently, his research has focused on soil and global climate change, including carbon and nitrogen emissions in agricultural and grassland ecosystems and soil carbon sequestration and its potential benefits to the ecosystem. Dr. Rice has also served in numerous capacities with the Soil Science Society of America. He currently is the chair of the National Academies’ Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources and has previously served on the National Academies’ U.S. National Soil Science Committee and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Air Quality Task Force. Internationally, he served on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to author the Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007, and was among the scientists recognized when that work won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Dr. Rice holds a B.S. from Northern Illinois University and a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. He joined the Kansas State University faculty in 1988, becoming an associate professor in 1993 and a professor in 1998.

James M. Tiedje (NAS) is the University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State University, and was the founding director of the National Science Foundation Center for Microbial Ecology. His research focused on microbial ecology; physiology and diversity, especially regarding the nitrogen cycle; and biodegradation of environmental pollutants and metagenomics to understand microbial community structure and function. His group has discovered several microbes that biodegrade chlorinated pollutants. He has published more than 500 papers that have been cited more than 100,000 times. He served as the editor-in-chief of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and as the editor of Microbial and Molecular Biology Reviews. He shared the 1992 Finley Prize from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for research contributions in microbiology of international significance, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Soil Science Society of America, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He served as the president of the American Society for Microbiology and the International Society for Microbial Ecology. He received his B.S. degree from Iowa State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University.

Kathe Todd-Brown, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, is a computational biogeochemist who uses mathematics and computers to understand how soil breathes. By

using data from multiple worldwide studies and simplifying or expanding the complexity of soil models to interoperate that data, she strives to give society a better understanding of this critical climate response. She is passionate about data and open reproducible science. Through the International Soil Carbon Network, she is working with collaborators across the globe to address harmonization issues in soils. She has been a postdoctoral fellow (2019) with Drs. Jennifer Baltzer (Wilfred Laurier University) and Merriett Turetsky (Guelph University), a Distinguished Linus Pauling Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a postdoctoral research fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory in Richland, Washington (2015–2018), and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma (2014). She received her Ph.D. (2013) from the University of California, Irvine, from the Department of Earth System Science. She holds a B.S. (2004) from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, in mathematics and has worked as a software developer for bioinformatics tools at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Rodrigo Vargas is a professor in the department of plant and soil sciences at the University of Delaware. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Riverside, and a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests focus on how biophysical factors regulate greenhouse gas dynamics in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems. He has participated in developing decision support systems and policy-relevant applications with contributions to the reports Status of the World’s Soil Resources and Second State of the Carbon Cycle by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Currently, he serves on the science steering committees of AmeriFlux and the Mexican Carbon Program and is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, Oecologia, and Global Change Biology. He is also a member of the cluster on Science and the Arts in the Earth and Environmental Science of the Franklin Institute, a member of the U.S. national committee for soil sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and a fellow of the Earth Leadership Program.

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