Research Expertise and Interest

global climate change, land-atmosphere interactions, ecohydrology, ecosystem response to climate change

Research Description

Lucas Vargas Zeppetello is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management leading the Plant Land-Atmosphere Climate Exchange (PLACE). His research focuses on understanding the relationships between water, energy, and carbon at Earth's land surface. These questions concern climate variability on disparate timescales, like heat waves and droughts; the importance of surface hydrology to climate variability and the land surface response to climate change; and the long-term fate of the terrestrial carbon cycle. He was an NSF GRFP fellow during graduate school at the University of Washington, a James S. McDonnell Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and recently won the American Geophysical Union's Holton Award for early career atmospheric scientists.