ForestGEO staff scientist wins 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
Dr. Kristina Anderson-Teixeira has recently been named a recipient of the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest recognition that the U.S. government bestows upon early-career researchers. Each year the Smithsonian Institution is permitted to nominate one scientist for consideration.
“I am deeply honored to receive this recognition, and grateful to the support of the Smithsonian, ForestGEO, and valued colleagues around the world,” said Krista. “I will continue to strive to understand how forests worldwide interact with our changing climate and to make this research relevant to efforts to conserve forests and mitigate climate change.”
The PECASE particularly recognizes scientists who demonstrate strong leadership potential. Krista leads the ForestGEO Ecosystems and Climate Program, which seeks to understand how global change is altering forests around the world and how changes to forest ecosystems will either mitigate or exacerbate climate change. Krista is one of the PIs of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute ForestGEO plot. She also led the creation of ForC, a large open-access database that features published ecosystem-level measurements of carbon stocks and annual fluxes for global forests.
In addition to making this climate-related data and code freely available through GitHub, Krista works to strengthen global scientific capacity by mentoring postdocs and students in a myriad of ways. Most recently she mentored the ecosystems topical group at ForestGEO’s annual analytical workshop, helping participants to hone their analyses, strengthen their R skills, and improve their scientific writing.
Krista is the lead author on the 2015 review paper which describes the ForestGEO network and summarizes insights from the network’s first 35 years of data collection and analysis. This article has been cited more than 200 times and has been an extremely helpful tool in introducing researchers to the network and showcasing its strengths. We are proud to have Krista as part of our team and grateful for all that her work has illuminated.
