Four Yale School of the Environment faculty members have been named to the world’s most influential researchers list by Clarivate Analytics, a company that compiles a list of scientists and social scientists whose papers rank in the top 1% of citations.
Included in this year’s list were Mark Bradford, professor of soils and ecosystem ecology; Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science; Peter Raymond, professor of ecosystem ecology; and Anthony Leiserowitz, founder and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
In total, 49 faculty members from Yale University made the list of 6,938 researchers worldwide, including Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, and William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and a Nobel Prize winner for his work in climate change economics. Both hold secondary appointments at YSE.
Bradford’s research focuses on the health, biology, ecology, and carbon storage potential of forest, grassland, and agricultural soils. More specifically, his work develops knowledge that helps predict how environmental change and management will affect the rates of carbon stabilization and decomposition processes, and how the size of soil organic carbon stores change in space and time. This year, Bradford joined the Central Park Climate Lab initiative, a partnership between the School, the Central Park Conservancy, and the New York City-based Natural Areas Conservancy aimed at studying the on-the-ground impacts of climate change on urban parks.
Seto is a world-renowned expert on urbanization, integrating remote sensing, modeling methods, and field interviews to study urbanization and land change, forecast urban growth, and examine environmental consequences of urban expansion. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has been a coordinating author on the last two U.N. climate change reports, including the urban mitigation chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment released earlier this year.
An expert on the chemistry and ecology of inland waters, Raymond’s research focuses on the exchange of greenhouse gases between inland waters and the atmosphere, controls on the transport of terrestrial elements to inland and coastal waters, the metabolism of aquatic ecosystems, and how storms and droughts impact aquatic ecology. Through his lab, Raymond leads a NASA-funded research team in Florida’s mangrove forests that is developing prototype blue carbon products to inform coastal carbon management.
Leiserowitz is one of the world’s foremost voices in climate change communications, gathering information on the public perception of climate change and environmental beliefs, attitudes, and behavior at multiple scales. Under his direction, YPCCC regularly publishes a report, Climate Change in the American Mind, which investigates, tracks, and explains public climate change knowledge, risk perceptions, policy support and behavior in the U.S. This year, the Center partnered with Meta’s Data for Good to create an international survey of public opinion on climate change, collecting data from 192 countries and territories worldwide. Leiserowitz recently presented these findings at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Paulo Brando, an internationally recognized expert of tropical ecosystems who will join the YSE faculty this semester, was also named to the list.
Published
November 16, 2022