Jennifer K. Balch burned the rainforest in order to help save it
As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Jennifer K. Balch studied Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She received her master’s and Ph.D. at Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She conducted her postdoctoral research at UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), and currently serves as a Science Advisor to NCEAS. Dr. Balch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at University of Colorado Boulder where she is founding director of Earth Lab which “integrates the massive volume of Earth systems data available from space, airplanes, sensor networks, social media and other sources to address environmental challenges.” Here is her story.
I grew up in Milwaukee, WI. Key influencers in my career trajectory were one of my high school biology teachers and Jane Goodall. My high school biology teacher was really the first teacher to encourage me to ask questions. I did a senior project looking at play behavior of gorillas at the Milwaukee Zoo.
Jennifer K. Balch studying the effects of fire in the rainforest. Photo:Courtesy image.
I spent hours watching two young gorillas learn through play and documenting their interactions. I also designed for a senior high-school biology class, what I thought was a brilliant test of the effects of second-hand smoke on brine shrimp. I concocted a way for a fish-tank aerator to smoke a cigarette (and yes, my high-school teacher bought me a pack of cigarettes!). And Jane Goodall, well, she’s just a rock star! She has been an amazing inspiration to many women scientists, for her brilliance, resolve, passion, and hope.
A professor at Princeton said to me, “You should really apply to be a postdoc at NCEAS” [UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis]. I distinctly remember getting the acceptance letter while I was checking my email in a hotel in Brasilia, after a three-month field season in the Amazon. I have spent over a decade of my career burning a 100-hectare tract of forest with a Brazilian-American team to understand the rainforests limits to fire, work that I started as a PhD student. I knew then that a postdoc at NCEAS was going to expand my horizons in ways that I couldn’t predict.
Synthesis science for me translated into a way to scale my questions. I study the role of fire in the Earth system, which I was really able to start working on at a global scale when I became an NCEAS postdoc. My work has evolved to target two main questions at national and global scales: how is fire changing? And what are the consequences for ecosystems and society?
For the last 25 years, NCEAS is a place that fosters the best parts of science. It’s an intellectual sandbox that really taught me how to do large- team science. I owe a great deal to Stephanie Hampton, Frank Davis, Mark Schildhauer, Matt Jones, Nancy Baron, the amazing support team, and many, many others who diligently created that sandbox and were pushing many frontiers that I was fortunate to be a part of.
I am the founding Director of Earth Lab, a data synthesis center for global environmental change research and education at the University of Colorado- Boulder. Sound familiar? I got to CU Boulder in 2014 and thought to myself why doesn’t Boulder have a synthesis center? It’s a place that’s chalk full of Earth nerds, space geeks, and data wizards who care deeply about our planet’s future. I pitched the idea to our university leadership that we needed to explore the treasure troves of Earth observations that we have already collected about our planet, moving from the era of data to the era of insight. We have a strong cohort of dynamic postdocs, we support cross-sector collider communities, and we have developed an education program in Earth data science. I think they’ve made an incredibly wise investment in an idea that was new to Boulder, but old to Santa Barbara.
