Get to know our team at the Terrer Lab at MIT
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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.
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.
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.
POSTDOC FELLOW
Leila is a multidisciplinary scientist with a foundation in theoretical physics and mathematics. She earned her Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich and has transitioned into studying global vegetation dynamics in the context of climate change. Utilizing a multi-faceted approach that includes long-term satellite images, ground observations, and advanced statistical techniques, her research aims to uncover the complex effects of environmental changes on global vegetation dynamics, focusing on aspects like growing season lengths, and plant phenology. While at MIT her research focuses on quantifying the roles that vegetation dynamics and cover changes play in biophysical and biogeochemical properties, as well as their effects on energy, water, and carbon fluxes.
Postdoc Fellow
Na Chen received a PhD in Remote Sensing from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, in November 2023. Her PhD research focused on assessing tropical forest disturbance and regrowth using earth observation sources. Her research interests encompass remote sensing, tropical forest monitoring, change detection, and time series analysis. At MIT, she is applying deep learning to fuse multi-source remote sensing data for crop water stress monitoring.
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.
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.
Postdoc Fellow
She obtained her PhD in earth system science from UC Berkeley, where she worked intensively with NGEE-Tropics team at LBNL. She was a postdoc fellow at Carnegie Institute for Science. Her research interests focus on the basic science of the mechanism of land-atmosphere coupling under the changing climate and on applied science in climate solutions, using a combination of multi-sensor land and atmosphere remote sensing observations, climate reanalysis data, and earth system models. Her research has advanced the understanding of how extreme storms affect the dynamics of temperate and tropical forests. Building upon her scientific foundation in climate change impacts, her interests have expanded to applied science, where she quantifies the mechanism, potential, and limits of viable climate solutions. At MIT, she is investigating the impact of increasing extreme storms on tropical carbon dynamics and evaluating the effectiveness of nature-based solutions.
Phd student
Jevan’s research focuses on the role of water in the global carbon cycle. He is currently investigating how peatlands—wet organic soils that are thought to hold more carbon than the world’s forests—respond to human and climatic disturbances, including land-use change, wildfire, and drought. This work draws from remote sensing, hydrological modeling, Bayesian inference, and time series analysis. Jevan graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Mathematical & Computational Science and a B.A. in History.
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.
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.
PhD Student
His research interests are centered around forest responses to global change, and the implications on the future of the terrestrial carbon sink. He received his B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University. His previous projects have utilized remote sensing, machine learning, and GIS techniques to research vegetation climate-mismatch, the impact of low-till agricultural practices on maize yield, and the impact of climate change on the volume of dead wood in forests.
PhD Student
Viki is interested in studying land use changes and their impact on terrestrial ecosystems, with a focus on soil carbon and biodiversity. She graduated from Princeton University in May 2024 with a B.S.E. in Computer Science and a certificate in Statistics & Machine Learning. Previously, her research has applied deep learning and statistical methods to topics ranging from ocean wave dynamics to methane plume detection.
Visiting PhD Student
Yifeng is currently a visiting PhD student in the Terrer Lab. Before joining the lab, he was pursuing his PhD at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, specializing in agricultural land use and climate change. His research interests focus on the response of global agricultural land use practices, such as cropland management, as a critical component of nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change.
M.Eng Student
Clara’s research interests lie at the intersection of policy, equity, and climate change mitigation. Her work at MIT focuses on characterizing carbon sequestration in agricultural land use as a nature-based solution to climate challenges. She received her B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley, where her previous research analyzed exposure to PM2.5 from the agricultural sector in California.
M.Eng Student
Joy is from Honolulu, Hawaii, and completed her B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT in May 2024. She is continuing at MIT for her M.Eng in the CEE Climate, Environment, and Sustainability track. She has done research on peatland carbon fluxes and affordable methods for farmers to measure soil respiration. She is passionate about soil and plant sciences, indigenous representation and gender equity in STEM, and braiding indigenous and western knowledges in research.
M.Eng Student
Ming is interested in the biogeochemical cycle of carbon in natural environments. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a B.A. in Earth & Environmental Sciences and Mathematics. Before joining the Terrer Lab, Ming did his research on seasonal stream metabolism variations in headwater streams and the glacial till provenance in McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica.
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