My research focuses on understanding the impacts of soil microbial community on carbon cycle under environmental change, including climate warming, elevated CO2, nitrogen deposition, wildfires, plant invasion, and land use change, using a data-model appraoch. The major approaches I used in my research include:
- Compiling comprehensive datasets for understanding the biogeography of soil microbial community.
- Using machine learning and deep learning approaches to generate novel datasets.
- Improving ecosystem and Earth system models by incorporating explicit soil microbial mechanisms.
- Applying the improved ecosystem and Earth system models with explicit soil microbial mechanisms to project carbon cycle under global change and understand the underlying mechanisms.
- Empowering microbial models with genetic data by informing microbe-mediated biogeochemical processes with high-resolution genome information.
Academic Appointment
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN | Apr 2024 - now
- Postdoctoral Research Associate | Environmental Science Division
- Advisor: Dr. Melanie Mayes
San Diego State University, San Diego, CA | May 2022-Apr 2024
- Postdoctoral Research Associate | Department of Biology
- Advisor: Dr. Xiaofeng Xu
Education
University of California at Davis & San Diego State University, CA | Jun 2022
- Doctor of Philosophy in Ecology | GPA: 3.95/4.0
- Dissertation: Multi-scale Modeling of Soil Microbial Control on Terrestrial Carbon Cycle
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China | Jun 2017
- Master of Science in Ecology
- Thesis: Effects of precipitation change and nitrogen deposition on aboveground net primary productivity in a temperate grassland, Inner Mongolia
Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, China | Jun 2014
- Bachelor of Agronomy in Forestry
- GPA: 3.98/4.0
- Rank: 1/28 in Department of Forestry