Joe Mascaro was a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. His work is at the intersection of pure research into global environmental change, and efforts to develop new Earth monitoring and climate mitigation strategies. He is the director of education and research at Planet, an aerospace company based in San Francisco, where he studies the ecological implications of climate change. Prior to joining Planet, Joe was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow in the US Global Development Lab at USAID, supporting worldwide efforts to use science and technology to reduce poverty.

Joe holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he focused his research on the proliferation of novel ecosystems in the Anthropocene. He also holds a BS in Resource Ecology and Management from the University in Michigan. Following his doctoral research, he worked for Carnegie Institution for Science and then for the Smithsonian Institution. He is an honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. Joe’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Aeon Magazine, Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Scientific Reports, Remote Sensing of Environment, Remote Sensing, and numerous other publications.