Dr. Mukund Palat Rao

BIOGRAPHY:

I am an Ecoclimatologist and Carbon Cycle Scientist. I received my PhD from Columbia University in 2020. I was then an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University (NYU), a NOAA Climate & Global Change fellow at University of California Davis (2021-2022), and subsequently a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), Barcelona, Spain (2022-2024). My research aims to illuminate the future of ecosystems and the forest carbon cycle in a changing climate by drawing on my expertise in climate science, plant ecophysiology, dendrochronology, earth system models, and remote sensing. My research spans a broad array of spatial and temporal scales from cells to satellites and seconds to centuries. I am currently working on projects related to the role of tree growth in the forest carbon cycle, the vulnerability of forests to increasing heat waves, and the use of dendrochronology to understand past environmental change and timber transport.

A complete list of my publications can be found on Google Scholar.