George Hurtt

University of Maryland
Professor
George Hurtt Image

George Hurtt earned a B.A. in Biology from Middlebury College in 1990. His advanced degrees are in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In 1992 he received a M.S. from the University of Connecticut. In 1994 he received a M.A., and in 1997 a Ph.D., from Princeton University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton prior to joining the faculty at the University of New Hampshire in 1998. Dr. Hurtt is interested in the theory and application of community and ecosystem ecology. He is involved in several collaborative research projects including the North American Carbon Program, NASA's Vegetation Structure Working Group, NASA's Carbon Monitoring System, and DOE's Integrated Earth System Modeling project. He leads an international effort on global land-use harmonization for the next IPCC assessment, and an Inter-Disciplinary Science investigation using NASA\'s Earth Observing System. He has published extensively on wide range of topics including: the dynamics and structure of plant communities, patterns of biodiversity, global land-use change, and both ocean and terrestrial ecosystem models for use in studies of the global carbon cycle and climate change. He is currently Science Team Leader of the NASA Carbon Monitoring System, Chair of the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Modeling Working Group, Chair of the ORNL DAAC User's Working Group, and Associate Editor of Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Previously, he served as Chair of the NASA Earth Science Senior Review, Co-Chair of the IGBP Fast Track Initiative on Biome Boundary Shifts, Lead Author of the New England Regional Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, Lead Author of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Editor of Ecology Letters, and Founding Director of NASA's educational initiative Research & Discover. Prior to joining UMD, Dr. Hurtt was Director of the Complex Systems Research Center in the Institute for the Study of Earth Oceans and Space, and Chair of the Natural Resources and Earth System Science Ph.D. Program at the University of New Hampshire. He has testified to both the New Hampshire Legislature and U.S. Congress on the science of global change.