Lewis Kunik
He/Him
I am gay and I am an earth scientist.//
I grew up on a dirt road in Minnesota, exploring the mixed forests and grasslands of my childhood home. At 18, I left Minnesota to pursue B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After 4.5 years of enduring screen-time, I took a technology detox and hiked for 5 months along the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, where walking from biome to biome, day after day, taught me to think at the "landscape scale”.
Nearly a decade later, I work on landscape-sized problems as an Earth scientist studying the carbon cycle of North American forests. Using satellite remote sensing, land-atmosphere models and tower-based gas monitors, I’ve researched topics ranging from urban CO2 emissions monitoring, carbon impacts of bark beetle and wildfire mortality, and continental-scale tracking of plants’ photo-protective pigments. I am a NASA and NSF research fellow and am fortunate to call the University of Utah my professional home, where I garner my inspiration from the beaUTAHful Wasatch mountains.
As a queer scientist, I strive to be a supportive colleague and mentor to people of all identities. I believe that diversity makes every community stronger across all scales, from one-on-one relationships, to lab groups and departments, to global networks of humans and professionals.