National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
c/o American Institute of Biological Sciences
1444 I St. NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005
Contact: Dan Johnson, 202/628-1500 x215
fax: 202/628-1509; djohnson@aibs.org

November 15, 2006

Meet the First CEO of NEON

Dr. David Schimel, Senior Scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has been named Chief Executive Officer of NEON.

Since 1992, Dr. Schimel has served as a terrestrial scientist in NCAR’s Climate and Global Dynamics Division, a member of Colorado State University’s Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, and as a Founding Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany.

“It was an honor to be asked,” said Schimel. “NEON is a critical step towards forecasting how ecosystems and organisms interact with changes in climate and land use, and the impact of these changes on people and their enterprises. And personally, the amazing NEON technology is like an irresistible big, shiny science toy.”

Dr. Schimel’s scientific interests and research activities coincide with the broad spatial scale of NEON design. They include biogeochemistry, the global carbon cycle and carbon cycle processes, climate impacts on ecosystems, scaling ecological theory to the landscape and larger regions, and disturbance (cultivation and fire) effects on ecosystem processes.

In recent years, Schimel has served on the NRC Ecosystem Panel, Committee on Global Change Research, Earth Science and Applications from Space Decadal Survey, Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data, the NOAA Carbon Cycle Advisory Committee, the World Climate Research Program’s Modeling Panel, and the NSF Geosciences Directorate Advisory Committee.

“NEON is a natural evolution for me, given my career-long focus on quantifying ecological processes over landscapes and larger scales, and I am very aware of what NEON will mean to our field and the next generation of ecologists. Our community has created a compelling plan that I am excited to help execute. I’m looking forward to working to integrate (and expand) the NEON team and the broad community to make this happen,” said Schimel.