Introducing the Next Cohort of NEON Ambassadors!

NEON's Ambassador Program empowers and connects a group of researchers and educators who are eager to enhance NEON’s engagement with diverse communities, getting NEON resources into the hands of those making strides in the field of ecology.

The inaugural cohort (2021 – 2023) paved the way for the Ambassador Program, shaping what it would become and guiding the future focus of the program. This second cohort is geared toward postdoctoral researchers, senior graduate students, and other early career scientists. NEON Ambassadors will receive training in group facilitation and creative problem-solving as well as in best practices for NEON data use. At the end of this program, Ambassadors will support the 2025 NEON Convergence Summit and lead a capstone event of their own with advice and support from a NEON mentor.

This next group of seven Ambassadors is a fantastic selection of applicants of people from all backgrounds, expertise, and with diverse passions – learn a bit about them below!

Alexi Besser

Postdoctoral Fellow – Arizona State University

Dr. Alexi Besser is a postdoctoral research scholar in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She earned a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of New Mexico in December 2022. As a broadly trained ecologist specializing in cutting-edge isotopic and molecular techniques, she investigates the biosynthesis and movement of essential compounds within and among organisms across a variety of systems and scales. Currently, most of her work is centered in the drylands of the western U.S., where environmental change and anthropogenic impacts are heavily influencing primary productivity. Besser primarily studies interactions between primary production, decomposition, and microbial function to characterize subsequent effects on nutrient cycling, consumer fitness, and food web stability. Her research has vastly improved understanding of the distinct patterns in amino acid stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values among primary producers and decomposers in terrestrial and freshwater environments.

Anna Spiers

Postdoctoral Fellow – Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Dr. Anna Spiers earned a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder in January 2023, and since April 2023 has been working as an earth sciences postdoctoral research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She is a forest ecologist who uses remote sensing, field observations, and process-based modeling in experimental and managed forests to study how temperate forests respond to disturbance. Her current work uses NEON remote sensing data to constrain a demographic vegetation model. During graduate school, Spiers studied the interaction of fragmentation and wildfire when the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019-2020 burned through her lab’s landscape-scale forest fragmentation experiment in New South Wales. Interning with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Spiers used current and projected tree-based carbon stock models to prioritize which land owners TNC should engage with for extending harvest or protecting old-growth forest for new carbon market projects. She also consulted with Forestoration International, helping to write up case studies of successful ecosystem restoration projects around the world that can serve as flagship examples for effective community engagement and long-term recovery.

Di Yang

Assistant Professor - University of Florida

Dr. Di Yang is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida, with five years of experience since obtaining a Ph.D. in Geography from the same institution in 2019. Her expertise lies in remote sensing applications for human-environment interactions, with a focus on integrating geospatial analytics, citizen science, and machine learning. Yang has secured numerous research grants as Lead PI or Co-PI from organizations like NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Her work combines cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence with citizen science approaches to address critical environmental challenges, particularly in land use change and wildfire studies. Yang serves as an editor for Nature - Scientific Reports and guest editor for several other journals in her field. As an educator, she has developed and taught courses in GIS, spatial modeling, and geographic visualization. She is also actively involved in organizing workshops and hackathons to promote geospatial literacy and citizen science.

Kit Lewers

Ph.D. Student – University of Colorado

Kit Lewers is a Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology and Information Science at CU Boulder, studying how information overload impacts institutions grounded in big data. Her research focuses on disciplinary silos and building bridges between them to make remote sensing, ecological, and biodiversity data more interoperable. She is particularly interested in implementing Event-Driven Microservice Architecture theory to create a collaborative, flexible, and infinitely scalable information ecosystem for understanding biodiversity and the Earth. Lewers is also the conference and workshop coordinator for iDigBio (Integrated Digitized BioCollections). During the summers, she works full-time as a software engineer, specializing in cloud application development, serverless architecture, infrastructure as code, and microservices in Amazon Web Services. She is also an active member of the Civil Air Patrol, combining a passion for science with aviation, taking a special interest in the NEON Airborne Observation Platform.

Max Glines

Postdoctoral Associate, Data Scientist – Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Dr. Max Glines received a Ph.D. in Biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2024, with a dissertation that explored variability in lake ecosystems, through the lens of water clarity, across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. He has used satellite imagery to model seasonality in water clarity across the U.S., long-term changes in water quality in southern Africa, and the potential for primary productivity in U.S. lakes. Glines is a member of a collaboration between Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) and NASA that aims to use hyperspectral satellite images to describe lake metabolism and microbe communities. He has also led multiple workshops for GLEON members and students at the University of Venda in South Africa on how to use R and Google Earth Engine for environmental research. Altogether, his experiences have been heavily shaped by collaboration, data sharing and the use of open-access datasets, and educational outreach.

Reid Longley

Postdoctoral Fellow – Los Alamos National Laboratory

Dr. Reid Longley is a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and leads a Department of Energy (DOE) Science Focus Area project focused on bacterial-fungal interactions. Several of his published papers - all relating to genomics, microbial ecology, and mycology – focus on interactions between important soil fungi and their intracellular endobacteria. Prior to his work at LANL, Longley received a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, with a dissertation focused on how agricultural management impacts soybean and maize-associated microbiomes, and was also a former National Microbiome data Collaborative (NMDC) ambassador. In addition to this research, he studied the Morchella (true Morels, an edible sac fungi) fruiting body microbiome and the impacts of bleaching on coral microbiomes. Longley contributed to the funding of this research through fellowships from the DOE, National Institutes of Health, and the NSF’s Long Term Ecological Research program.

Yujie Liu

Postdoctoral Fellow – NAU Center for Ecosystem Science and Society

Dr. Yujie Liu is a second-year postdoctoral researcher at Northern Arizona University (NAU), having completed a Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, with bachelor's and master's degrees from China. Currently, she is working on an NSF-funded project to evaluate the interoperability of NEON and AmeriFlux data streams. The project is motivated by the fact that long-term time series are essential for detecting ecological changes and predicting future trends. Some of Liu’s work so far compares different methods for gap-filling flux data, and establishing a multiple-scale workflow to assess the agreement of AmeriFlux and NEON data streams from Bartlett Experimental Forest (BART). Her future plans are to synthesize data from 10 sites across eight NEON Domains where parallel observations of NEON and AmeriFlux are conducted in close proximity.