Department: Integrated Science and Technology

 Areas of expertise:

• Climate Change
• Weather
• Air Pollution

Tobias Gerken is a broadly trained environmental and atmospheric scientist teaching courses about environmental science and sustainability as part of the Integrated Science and Technology major. Topics include climate change, air and water pollution, ecological processes as well as global ecosystem change. 

His research focuses on land-atmosphere interactions. He is particularly interested in the surface flux dynamics of water, energy, and trace gases between ecosystems and atmosphere and their impacts on weather and climate.

He has also investigated the role of agricultural land management in the Northern Great Plains on rainfall and the role of feedbacks between land and atmosphere for the rapid development of drought.

Tobias Gerken has conducted field research in the Brazilian Amazon and on the Tibetan Plateau to better understand the exchange energy, water, and carbon dioxide between ecosystems and atmosphere and how this may be affected by environmental change and human activities.

He earned a Diplom (BSc & MSc equivalent) in environmental science and a doctorate in environmental and atmospheric science at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He formerly was an assistant research professor at Penn State’s Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science and a research associate at Montana State University’s Department of Land Resources and Environmental Science.

Media contact: Eric Gorton, gortonej@jmu.edu, 540-908-1760.