Rate My Professor Scott Saleska

Scott R. Saleska is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at The University of Arizona, where he advanced to full professor in 2017 after serving as associate professor from 2011 to 2017 and assistant professor from 2005 to 2011. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Science since 2008, serves as a faculty affiliate of the Institute of the Environment since 2005, and is Director of Landscape Evolution Observatory Research at Biosphere 2. Prior roles include research associate from 2002 to 2004 and postdoctoral fellow from 1999 to 2001 in Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Saleska earned his Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998, with a dissertation on global climate change and ecosystem carbon storage advised by John Harte, and a B.S. in Physics with a minor in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. Early career support included NASA Global Change Fellowship from 1994 to 1997 and NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from 1996 to 1998.

A global change ecologist, Saleska investigates how ecological communities—from leaves and microbial groups to landscapes—regulate land-atmosphere interactions and biogeochemical processes amid climate change, using ecophysiology, micrometeorology, remote sensing, process modeling, and microbial meta-omics. His research illuminates carbon dynamics in climate-critical ecosystems, including Amazon forests and thawing permafrost. Seminal publications include 'Carbon in Amazon forests: unexpected seasonal fluxes and disturbance-induced losses' (Science, 2003), revealing unanticipated dry-season carbon uptake; 'Amazon forests green-up during 2005 drought' (Science, 2007), challenging prior views on drought impacts; 'Leaf development and demography explain photosynthetic seasonality in Amazon evergreen forests' (Science, 2016); and 'Genome-centric metagenomic insights into microbial carbon processing across a permafrost thaw gradient' (Nature, 2018). Saleska was elected Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2019 and Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2025 for fundamental discoveries in global ecology of carbon cycling. He held the Agnese Nelms Haury Faculty Fellowship in Environment and Social Justice from 2014 to 2016.