Thomas Harris spent his early career working for a timber company, then built a dissertation around what a similar company was doing to a forest in Brazil. He landed a professorship before he finished writing it up.
Thomas Harris ’26 PhD has spent his career thinking about what forests reveal over time — the accumulation of growth, the recovery of land left to heal. His own trajectory has followed a similar logic: patient, adaptable, rooted.
Harris grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, three hours from the mountains and three hours from the beach— and always knew he wanted to work in forestry. He was the kind of student who competed in the forestry event at the Science Olympiad in high school, applied to exactly one college, and never looked back.
After graduating summa cum laude from North Carolina State’s forestry program, he headed to Georgia, where he spent several years as a procurement forester for International Paper before enrolling in a master’s program at the University of Georgia. There, he quantified the wood volume biometrics of longleaf pine — niche, technical work that gave him a practitioner’s fluency with forests as both ecological systems and economic ones.
That combination of hands-on experience and academic rigor was exactly what prompted Mark Ashton, the Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology and Senior Associate Dean of The Forest School, to take Harris on as a doctoral student.
“Thomas has the wonderful advantage of being a doctoral student with solid work experience and understanding of managing forests for wood production,” Ashton said. “This prepared him well for his doctoral work investigating the carbon and forest biomass synergies of commercial reforestation and native forest regrowth.”
That doctoral work unfolded, somewhat unexpectedly, in Brazil. Harris had originally planned to study land-use change in Romania, examining how the collapse of communist rule in the late 1980s and the restoration of private property rights had reshaped forest management. When the COVID-19 pandemic made international travel impossible in 2020, just as Harris was beginning his PhD, those plans had to change.
Ashton suggested Harris connect with Daniel Piotto, ’06 MF, ’11 PhD , a professor at Federal University of Southern Bahia in Brazil, and together they scoped out a remote sensing project that could be conducted entirely from a computer. Harris spent a summer studying land-use change from satellite imagery and found himself drawn in.
“After spending a summer on the computer just looking at it from space, I got really interested in those ideas and that topic,” Harris said. “It merged into my whole dissertation.”
His research focused on the Atlantic Forest region of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, where a pulp and paper company had begun acquiring large tracts of land in the mid-1990s, coinciding with a period of political and economic opening that drew foreign investment into industrial forestry. Using satellite data, Harris tracked year-by-year changes in forest cover across the land the company had purchased. What he found ran counter to the assumptions many might bring to a story about industrial logging: forest cover had actually increased. The company planted eucalyptus for pulp production on some parcels, but, critically, it also removed chronic pressures, such as cattle grazing and annual pasture burning, that had long suppressed natural forest recovery on others. Freed from those disturbances, the native forest regenerated on its own.
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Harris also took a leadership role in a Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture grant. Working in collaboration with Professor Yuan Yao and Assistant Professor Luke Sanford, he examined the carbon storage, biodiversity, and watershed protection benefits of these very different land uses side by side.
There is a certain irony Harris appreciates: he spent his early career working for International Paper, and he ended up devoting his dissertation to understanding what a similar company was doing to a forest on the other side of the world.
Before finishing his doctorate, Harris accepted a position as an assistant professor of forestry at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee. He has already completed his first year there, teaching courses on forest restoration, tropical forest ecology and management, and introduction to forestry.
The tropical forestry course he’s teaching at Sewanee was built directly from the research and coursework he did at YSE.
“I had been to the Galápagos Islands once as an undergrad, but I don’t think I knew very much about the tropics in general, and especially forest management in the tropics,” Harris said. “That was a skill set that I developed as a PhD student that is already being put into practice.”
An architect by training, Mayowa Abolaji came to YSE to think bigger than buildings. He leaves YSE with a vision for what climate-equitable design can look like across the rapidly urbanizing Global South.
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