Michael Thomas Coe

Dr. Coe is an earth system scientist who specializes in understanding how human land cover change and land management decisions affect the energy and water cycles, and ultimately feedback to regional climate. He is currently participating in projects based in the Brazilian Amazon and savanna environments. He leads field research programs to collect data on how expanding agriculture changes evaporation, soil moisture, river discharge, and biochemical cycles. He and his colleagues combine field data with satellite observations and earth system computer models to better understand the scale of historical and potential future human impacts on tropical climate and ecosystems and help develop mitigation strategies. Dr. Coe previously spent seven years as a scientist at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been a visiting scientist at Lund University, Sweden, and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2014, Dr. Coe was in residence as a Fulbright Scholar at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, continuing his work with colleagues there to understand how massive deforestation in the savanna regions of Brazil may affect the climate in the coming decades.