William (Bill) Anderegg
Bill is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah and was the inaugural director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy from 2022-2025. He received his bachelors and Ph.D. from Stanford University and did a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University. He received the Alan T. Waterman Award, PECASE, and CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the National Laureate in Life Sciences from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and the Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering.
Postdocs
Libby Blanchard
Libby received her PhD in geography from Cambridge University in 2020 where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her research broadly aims to inform climate mitigation policy to make it more effective and equitable, and specifically focuses on the use of forests in climate mitigation strategies. Her current work follows two tracks: i) examining the use, prevalence and implications of carbon offsets in net zero commitments; and ii) informing the design of proposed ‘contribution models’ to conserve forests for the climate and co-benefits forests provide.
Nadia Colombi
Nadia received her PhD in the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard. She works at the intersection of climate change, air pollution, public health, and disaster mitigation. Her current work uses a data-driven modeling approach to develop high-resolution wildfire risk assessments for the state of Utah, helping communities anticipate, prepare for, and reduce their wildfire risk in a changing climate.
Huiying Xu
Huiying received her PhDs at Tsinghua University and University of Exeter in 2024. She is broadly interested in how vegetation responds to climate change, spanning scales from individual plants to entire communities. As a postdoc in the Anderegg lab, she investigates how trees along elevational gradients respond to repeated drought events, and how sapwood area shifts with tree age based on optimality principles.
Linqing Yang
Linqing received her PhD in Ecology and Conservation Biology from Texas A&M University. Her research interests include estimating land surface parameters with remote sensing data and machine learning methods and understanding the impacts of climate variability on terrestrial ecosystem function and land surface dynamics. Now she is working towards quantifying the climate mitigation potential of forest carbon offset as nature-based climate solutions.
Graduate students
Tegan Lengyel
Tegan received her bachelor’s from the University of Utah in 2022. As an undergraduate, she worked with Dr. Jim Ehleringer to use stable isotopes to understand variations in Encelia ecophysiological traits. In the Anderegg Lab, Tegan is interested in studying the impact of climate change on forest biodiversity and carbon sequestration, as well as understanding how scientific research can be used to inform policy decisions.
Josephine Meier
Josie received her bachelor’s from the University of Washington in 2023. Her research aims to improve our understanding of the impact of climate change on forest regeneration and recovery dynamics through hydraulic trait analysis and demographic modeling.
Lab Alumni
Grayson Badgley, departed for postdoc at Columbia U
Antoine Cabon, departed for SNF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowship
Jaycie Fickle, departed for postdoc at Technical University of Munich
Steve Kannenberg, departed for Assistant Professor at West Virginia University
Kelly Kerr, departed for postdoc at UC Santa Barbara
Jacob Levine, departed for Assistant Professor at Duke University
Meng Liu, departed for postdoc at UC Santa Barbara
Annapurna Post-Leon, departed for postdoc at UC Santa Barbara
Xiaonan Tai, departed for Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology
Anna Trugman, departed for Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara
Martin Venturas, departed for Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid
German Vargas G., departed for Assistant Professor at Oregon State University
Chao Wu, departed for Assistant Professor at Tsinghua University
Kailiang Yu, departed for postdoc at LSCE
Cedric Zahnd, departed for postdoc at University of Antwerp
Nicole Zenes, departed for scientific programmer at NOAA