Biography

Cristina Castanha is an assistant research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior research associate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is an ecologist and biogeochemist who studies the effects of climate change and other anthropogenic influences on vegetative land cover and the terrestrial carbon cycle. For the past three years she has been studying conifer seedling demographics in Colorado’s Front Range. And over the past fifteen years she has worked in a variety of locations and on a series of collaborations investigating the controls on carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Her work uses natural environmental gradients, field experiments, isotope analyses, and laboratory analyses. Cristina holds a B.S. in Fermentation Science from UC Davis (1985), an M.S. in Environmental Systems from Humboldt State University (1992), and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley (2004). At UC Berkeley she served as lecturer in Environmental Sciences and as teaching assistant for a variety of classes including Environmental Problems, Development and Classification of Soils, and Renewable Resources for Electrical Generation.