Our Advisors
George Burba, PhD
LI-COR Science & Strategy Fellow
Daugherty Water for Food Institute Global Fellow
National Academy of Inventors Senior Member
University of Nebraska Graduate Adjunct Professor
Dr. George Burba has over 360 publications, including 6 books (first authorship) and over 100 refereed scientific publications. He has multiple 'Highly Cited' and 'Top 10' papers cited in IPCC and FAO Reports, Nature, Science, PNAS, Environmental S&T and Nature Climate Change, among others. Dr. Burba's books are part of the curricula in 50+ top-tier universities, and in 30+ libraries, such as Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Imp College London, Karlsruhe and Max Planck.
Dr. Burba has taught over 150 courses, seminars, and lectures at universities and conferences alike in more than 30 countries. Among them are AmeriFlux, Argonne, AsiaFlux, BASC, Battelle, EPA, ICOS, InGOS, IITM, NEON, OzFlux, WMO and more. Additionally, he has offered over 450 presentations and webinars.
He has served on advisory boards, review panels, steering, grant, search and organizing committees at over 40 organizations and groups including IPCC, AmeriFlux, DWFI, Elsevier, EPSCoR, EU Commission, ICOS, InGOS, NCSE, NEON, FFAR, Israel Ministry of Science, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NU Office of RED, WMO, etc.
Derek Johnson, PhD
West Virginia University Honors Faculty Fellow
& Associate Professor
Dr. Derek Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University, where he previously served as a research assistant professor from 2013 to 2018.
Dr. Johnson conducts research on methane and other greenhouse gas emissions and the use of gaseous fuels to power internal combustion engines. He collaborates with fellow researchers from across the Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions. As part of these collaborations, Dr. Johnson has served as researcher, principal investigator, or Co-PI, on more than $20 million in externally funded research projects.
He has published more than 30 journal articles and conference proceedings. He is also a Registered Professional Engineer in the state of West Virginia (PE 22704). He teaches Thermodynamics and Applied Thermodynamics along with Energy and Its Implications.
Bruce Johnson, PhD
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics
Dr. Bruce Johnson received his doctorate from Michigan State University in agricultural economics before joining faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. There, he has led teaching and research efforts on agriculture and resource economics for 38 years
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Dr. Johnson's work with the university's Department of Agricultural Economics helped it serve as Nebraska's primary source of information on agricultural land valuation and related market issues. Additionally, his work is widely used across the state by policy makers, bankers, realtors and organizations that manage agricultural and rural land resources.
His work drove the establishment of the Nebraska Agricultural Land Studies Fund in order to continue future research and analysis of Nebraska's agricultural land markets.
John Gamon, PhD
SpecNet Co-Founder
University of Alberta Professor
Dr. John Gamon trained under Nobel Prize laureate Christopher Field. He studies the "breathing of the planet," the exchanges of carbon and water vapor between the biosphere and the atmosphere that affect ecosystem productivity and help regulate our atmosphere and climate. Of particular interest are the effects of disturbance (fires, succession, weather events and climate change) on these basic processes.
Dr. Gamon pioneered the use of the relationship between leaf xanthophyll cycle pigment content and spectral reflectance to improve satellite monitoring of photosynthesis. Gamon's seminal work resulted in the development of the Photochemical Reflectance Index (PRI). As of 2017, Dr. Gamon has published 95 papers and received 7,613 citations; his work has had a significant impact in the discipline of remote sensing.
Additional research questions involve the detection of plant physiology, ecosystem function, species composition, and biodiversity using non-contact sampling methods. Much of this work is done with optical monitoring (remote sensing and automated field methods), and entails the development of new monitoring methods and related informatics tools.
To encourage wider usage of these methods, Dr. Gamon co-founded SpecNet, (Spectral Network), a network of collaborating sites and investigators using optical sampling methods (particularly spectral reflectance) to study ecological questions. He conducts fieldwork in a range of ecosystems from the Arctic to the Tropics.
Gilberto Pastorello, PhD
Integrated Data Frameworks Group
Research Scientist
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Post Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Gilberto Pastorello is a research scientist in the Integrated Data Frameworks Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research is focused on managing the life-cycle of scientific data and implementing new methods for data integration at multiple stages of processing, data quality assurance for heterogeneous data sources, and algorithms for execution and evaluation of data processing pipelines for environmental data, particularly carbon, water, energy fluxes and micro-meteorological data.,
Dr. Pastorello is part of the team creating the FLUXNET datasets, which are used in research ranging from soil microbiology to climate change. He has also contributed to the Deduce project, investigating data change dynamics, and to the Tigres project, investigating workflow specification APIs and workflow patterns for data intensive pipelines.
Before joining the Lawrence Berkeley National Labortatory as a Post Doctoral Fellow in March 2013, he held post doctoral positions at the University of Alberta in Canada. There, he implemented end-to-end data management solutions for biodiversity data and micro-meteorological data from traditional and wireless sensor networks systems, created data processing pipelines for optical data acquired from a variety of platforms an, created Web-based data exploration portals.
Greg Norris, PhD
International Living Future Institute Chief Scientist
NetPositive Enterprise Sustainability and Health Initiative Co-Director
New Earth Institute Founder
Dr. Gregory Norris is an internationally acclaimed Life Cycle Analysis expert. In addition to serving as the International Living Future Institute’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Norris is the co-director of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise within the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is also the founder of New Earth, a non-profit institute developing technologies that enable people across the globe to drive sustainable development “from the bottom up.”
He has taught Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at the Harvard School of Public Health for over 20 years. In addition to teaching, Dr. Norris is working on New Earth projects, including Earthster, an open source platform for product-level sustainability assessment, Handprinter, which helps people take actions at both work and home to compensate for their environmental and social “footprints."
Dr. Norris and New Earth are also creating the Social Hot Spots Database, a transparent data source on supply chain impacts and opportunities for improving human rights, working conditions, community and other social impacts.