Rate My Professor Jennifer Balch

Jennifer Balch is Professor of Geography, Director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Impact Lab (ESIIL), and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2008, M.S. from Yale University in 2004, and B.A. from Princeton University in 1999. Balch's research interests encompass fire ecology, land use/land cover change, global change ecology, and tropical forest ecology. Her work aims to understand the patterns and processes that underlie disturbance and ecosystem recovery, particularly how shifting fire regimes are reconfiguring tropical forests, encouraging non-native grass invasion, and affecting global climate. She addresses key questions such as fire's role in the Earth system and its interactions with climate warming, the establishment of invasive grass-fire cycles, and the alteration of tropical-forest dynamics by increased human-initiated fires, including changes to carbon cycles and recovery trajectories. Balch explores global patterns of anthropogenic climate and land cover disruptions to inform opportunities to curb and adapt to these changes.

Balch has earned major awards including the 2025 American Geophysical Union Fellowship, Ecological Society of America Early Career Fellowship in 2016, and National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award in 2019. Her influential publications include "Fire in the Earth System" (Science, 2009), "The Amazon Basin in Transition" (Nature, 2012), "Human-started Wildfires Expand the Fire Niche Across the United States" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017), "Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California" (Earth's Future, 2019), "Extreme Fire Seasons are Looming - Science Can Help Us Adapt" (Nature, 2024), "The Fastest-Growing and Most Destructive Fires in the US (2001 to 2020)" (Science, 2024), and "Rare and Highly Destructive Wildfires Drive Human Migration in the US" (Nature Communications, 2024). Through her leadership roles, Balch advances environmental data science and contributes to ecological research on fire regimes and human-environment interactions.