Meet the team
Ecologists, data scientists, and field researchers working on the global carbon cycle.
César Terrer is a climate ecologist whose work centers on the terrestrial carbon cycle. He investigates how plant and soil carbon pools respond to rising CO₂ and climate change, and develops evidence-based strategies to increase land carbon storage as nature-based climate solutions.
Through meta-analyses, field syntheses and modeling, he has shown that plant–microbe symbioses are first-order controls on global carbon uptake, that nutrient availability limits how much extra growth rising CO₂ can produce, and that carbon gained in biomass often comes at the expense of carbon stored in soil.
Current work targets major uncertainties in tropical carbon budgets: decadal trends in soil organic carbon; CO₂ effects on tropical forest at a natural volcanic CO₂ experiment in Costa Rica; biomass and soil responses to convective windthrow in Amazonia; the consequences of losing animal seed dispersers for forest regrowth; and the sensitivity of tropical carbon stocks to extreme drought.
He completed his PhD at Imperial College London and joined MIT in 2021. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2024 and was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2025.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
Duncan is interested in how climate change alters tropical ecosystems and their role in the terrestrial carbon cycle. In the Terrer Lab, he is using remote sensing and field observations to study wind disturbances in Amazonian forests. Previously, he worked as a research assistant at the University of Michigan on LiDAR and microwave remote sensing retrievals of vegetation structure and water storage. He received an A.B. in Geology-Biology from Brown University.