Meet the Terrer Lab

César Terrer

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT MIT CEE

He obtained his PhD in Ecosystem Ecology and Climate Change from Imperial College London, where he started working at the interface between experiments and models to better understand the effects of elevated CO2 on vegetation. Dr. Terrer’s research has advanced our understanding on the effects of CO2 in terrestrial ecosystems, the role of soil nutrients in a climate change context, and plant-soil interactions. Synthesizing observational data from CO2 experiments and satellites through meta-analysis and machine-learning, César has found that microbial interactions between plants and soils play a major role in the carbon cycle at a global scale, affecting the speed of global warming.

Evan Fricke

RESEARCH SCIENTIST

He addresses linkages between the biodiversity and climate crises by modeling how animal biodiversity changes affect the functioning of plant communities. His background includes a PhD from the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, and a faculty fellowship at Rice University. At MIT, he is focused on feedbacks between animal biodiversity and carbon dynamics by modeling how seed dispersal by animals affects natural forest regrowth. He pairs a background in field ecology and natural history with skills in data synthesis and machine learning.

Shuli Chen

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Shuli is a postdoctoral researcher in the Terrer Lab. She received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from University of Arizona, where she developed a remotely-sensed functional biogeography of forest responses to droughts in the Amazon, combining insights from environmental drivers and functional traits to understand forest resilience to climate. At MIT, she is extending the functional biogeography approach from Amazon to the global tropics, starting with Africa, focusing on ecohydrological–biological interactions in ecosystem dynamics across continents under climate change. Her research aims to understand the tropical forest carbon sink vulnerability and resilience across space and time.

Diego Grados

POSTDOC FELLOW

Diego is a bioscience engineer, agroecologist, and applied statistician dedicated to addressing sustainable development challenges in agriculture. He earned his PhD from KU Leuven in Belgium and completed a postdoctoral position at Aarhus University in Denmark. Diego uses interdisciplinary approaches focusing on basic and applied aspects of soil-plant-atmosphere and management interactions through field experimentation, agroecosystem analysis, process-based modeling, and remote sensing. His research spans tropical, semi-arid, and temperate regions, with an emphasis on nitrogen and water cycling. At MIT, Diego investigates the biophysical, biogeochemical, and management factors that influence nitrous oxide emissions, aiming to improve the understanding and quantification of these emissions from agricultural soils.

Sara Cerasoli

POSTDOC FELLOW

Sara obtained her Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental challenges, focusing on natural climate solutions and water management. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, she integrates ecohydrology, economic modeling, dynamical systems theory, stochastic processes, and optimization methods. At MIT, Sara’s research centers on land-atmospheric feedback in natural climate solutions, analyzing their impact on carbon and water cycles. The focus is to develop optimal policies that harmonize water conservation, food production, and carbon mitigation strategies.

Shuai Ren

POSTDOC FELLOW

Shuai Ren received his PhD degree in soil carbon science from Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Ren’s doctoral research concentrated on the response and adaptation of soil carbon to climate warming and livestock grazing, employing meta-analytical and modeling methods to deepen our understanding of these processes in the context of global environmental change. At MIT, he is assessing the greenhouse gas emissions from the global livestock sector and human diet change.

Ruofei Jia

PHD STUDENT

Before coming to MIT, she studied Geology and Environmental Engineering and did her research on the deforestation of the Amazon Forest using remote sensing. At MIT she is studying the global carbon cycle in the context of climate change. Her research focuses on plant-soil interactions and soil’s capacity for carbon storage using data from field observations, remote sensing, and experiments.

Hongbo Guo

VISITING PHD STUDENT

Hongbo is a visiting student at the Terrer Lab and a PhD candidate in ecosystem ecology from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Hongbo is interested in understanding the large-scale biogeographical pattern of plant functional traits from individual to community levels, and their influence on ecosystem processes. His current work at MIT focuses on how various above- and belowground traits coordinate or trade off to maintain community productivity under the co-limitation of multiple resources, specifically light, nitrogen, and water.

Maria E. Macfarlane

PHD STUDENT

Prior to joining the Terrer Lab, Maria received a Master’s degree in Environmental Sciences from ETH Zurich. Her laboratory work at ETH focused on the influence of minerals on soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in alpine ecosystems. At MIT, she studies soil organic carbon saturation by synthesizing sorption experiments of specific carbon compounds on common soil minerals. Her work combines this mechanistic understanding of soil carbon saturation with a Bayesian modeling framework in order to estimate the maximum SOC storage of undisturbed soils globally. These results can be applied to calculate SOC sink saturation rates of nature-based solutions and thus inform the efficiency of restoration efforts.

Jevan Yu

PHD STUDENT

Jevan is broadly interested in the flow of carbon, water, and heat through terrestrial ecosystems, including the dependencies and influences on the climate. His current research is focused on quantitatively characterizing these dynamics in wetlands, the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth and the largest natural source of atmospheric methane. To do so, he uses a combination of theory, computational modeling, and field measurements. He holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science and B.A. in History from Stanford University.

Claire Chen

M. ENG STUDENT

Claire is interested in climate, environment, and sustainability, with a focus on how ecosystems interact with the atmosphere. At MIT, her research explores land–atmosphere dynamics in forest ecosystems, particularly how soil moisture shapes evapotranspiration, surface energy balance, and low cloud formation during forest regrowth. Before coming to MIT, she earned her B.S. in Environmental Science and Economics from UMass Amherst, where she worked on environmental toxicology, climate change, and air quality research.

Leila Mirzagholi

Na Chen

Yanlei Feng

Trevor Cambron

Viki Mancoridis

Viki Mancoridis

Clara Rong

Joy Domingo-Kameenui

Ming Chen

Kathryn Wheeler

Sydney Wickman

Jennifer Schug

Stephen Bell

Wenzhe Jiao

Xiao Junlan

Zhao Zhang

Helena Vallicrosa

Alexandra Chua