Dr. J. Morgan Grove is a Social Ecologist and Team Leader for the USDA Forest Service's Baltimore Field Station. He is a Co-Principal Investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) LTER. Grove was a dual major in Architecture and Studies in the Environment from Yale College (B.A.), a M.F.S. in Community Forestry from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a M. Phil. and Ph.D. in Social Ecology from Yale University.
Grove has worked in Baltimore since 1989 and was a founding member of the BES LTER. Grove leads the social science team for BES, where his research focuses on long term dynamics of property regimes, land management, and watersheds. Grove is the science lead for the Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) software tools. In 2001, for his work in Baltimore, Grove was the first social scientist in the U.S. Forest Service to ever receive the President’s award for early career scientists.

Dr. Christopher Boone is Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is presently a visiting professor at Georgetown University.
For more than a dozen years, he has participated in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study examining the long term social and environmental drivers and consequences of urbanization. His research contributes to ongoing debates in sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, vulnerability, and global environmental change. He is a co-PI for the Central Arizona Phoenix LTER,
Baltimore Ecosystem LTER, two Urban Long Term Research Area projects (DC, Los Angeles) and the PI for a comparative ULTRA award (Phoenix, Albuquerque, Las Cruces) all supported by the National Science Foundation. For the past three years he has sat on the scientific steering committee for the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change project, a core initiative of the International Human Dimensions program, and also participated in the US Global Change Research Program's US National Climate Assessment for Cities. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto in 1994.

Dr. Deborah Balk is Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY)’s Baruch School of Public Affairs and the CUNY Graduate Center (in the Sociology and Economics Programs) and Associate Director of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. Her expertise lies in spatial demography and the integration of earth and social science data and methods to address interdisciplinary policy questions. Her current research focus is on urbanization, population, poverty, and environmental interactions (such as climate change). Prior to joining CUNY in 2006, she was a research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network where she was also lead Project Scientist for the NASA-funded Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center. She received her PhD in Demography from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and A.B. in International Relations, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has recently completed service on a National Research Council panel on Himalayan Glaciers, Hydrology, Climate Change, and Implications for Water Security and co-authored a paper on city population forecasts and water scarcity in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Paty Romero-Lankao is a "multidisciplinary sociologist" by training leading the Urban Futures Initiative at NCAR (http://www.ral.ucar.edu/staff/prlankao-staff.php), US where she is a research scientist since 2006. Her work has focused on crucial intersections between urban development and the environment. In particular, she has studied key issues of (a) how particular cities attempt to meet the challenges of reducing emissions while improving their capacity to respond to environmental impacts; (b) how urban development impacts the environment; and (c) what societal factors
explain cities' vulnerability/resilience to environmental hazards. In addition to research supported by academic awards, she has participated in global and local endeavors promoted by IPCC, UNDP and UN-HABITAT. She was co-leading author to Working Group II of the Nobel prize- winning IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report and is currently convening author of the AR5 North American chapter.

Dr. Frances E. “Ming” Kuo is a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the multidisciplinary Landscape and Human Health Laboratory. She holds appointments in both the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and in the Department of Psychology. Her background is in cognitive psychology and environmental psychology, with degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (M.A.) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D.). Ming Kuo is a nationally and internationally recognized scientist examining the impacts of urban landscapes on human health. Her research focuses on how the presence of trees, grass, and other natural elements within the settings of daily life supports healthy human functioning in both individuals and communities. Starting in 1993, she led a series of studies on the impacts of green residential spaces on human functioning in inner city Chicago, for which she and her collaborators received the Environmental Design Research Association’s Achievement Award. Subsequently, she and her former student Dr. Andrea Faber Taylor began examining the impacts of green spaces on Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD); that line of investigation has yielded both rigorously controlled evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between physical environments and AD/HD symptoms, as well as a large, national study documenting the generalizability of this relationship. Currently, in addition to her AD/HD work, Dr. Kuo is investigating positive impacts of schoolyard environments on students’ academic achievement (as measured by standardized test scores), and the impacts of green space on physical health. Dr. Kuo’s work has convincingly linked healthy urban ecosystems to stronger, safer neighborhoods, lower crime, reduced AD/HD symptoms, reduced aggression, and an array of mental health indicators.