Susan Trumbore

Susan Trumbore (Germany) is a US-American earth system scientist. She is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Professor (part-time) of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, and Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Sciences at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany. Susan earned her PhD in geochemistry from Columbia University in 1989.

Susan is an expert in terrestrial carbon cycling. Her research traces the excess radiocarbon produced by nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s ecosystems to understand processes controlling how trees allocate the photosynthetic products, and how long organic carbon is stabilized in soils.  She has supported the development of the  International Soil Radiocarbon database and associated synthesis products that provide important constraints for global carbon cycle models.

More generally, Susan is interested in the exchange of energy, water and greenhouse gases between land and atmosphere. She works mostly in large collaborative projects in ecosystems that have potentially large but uncertain responses to ongoing climate change. She currently co-leads the German-Brazilian Amazon Tall Tower Observatory - ATTO, and a large collaboration between the Max-Planck Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences on European-Asian Drylands.

Susan has been a Science Steering committee member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and participated in US National Research Council reports related to climate change. She is author or co-author of ~300 papers and is a member of the Leopoldina, Academia Europaea, US and Chinese Academies of Science.