Dr. Jessica Chiartas is a soil biogeochemist seeking to build bridges between science and industry, policy, and the populace. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, where she also served as a postdoctoral scholar and a fellow with the Innovation Institute for Food and Health. Her research has focused on the long-term impacts of management on soil carbon (with a unique focus on depth and field scale variability) and broadly, soil health and ecosystem services across a diversity of soils, climates, and production systems. Through participatory research and multi-stakeholder engagement, she seeks to develop communities of practice for the co-creation and sharing of knowledge/resources and create the marketplace infrastructure necessary to support and incentivize the transition to soil health/regenerative management.
Jessica has a strong passion and proclivity for outreach and extension, translating research to a diversity of stakeholders and building bridges between science and industry, policy, and the populace. She represents UC Davis in the California Farm Demonstration Network; served on the ASA-CSA-SSSA Science Policy Committee, as well as the Climate Task Force to inform the Biden administration on climate and agriculture; and sits on multiple Technical Advisory Boards. She is the lead of RegenScore; a multi-stakeholder collaboration between food purchasers, farmers/ranchers, academics, non-profits, and NGOs using multi-criteria decision analysis and on-farm data collection to develop rigorous, but accessible monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) protocols that can validate market- and policy-based incentives for soil health/regenerative management. She is also founder and creator of Soil Life – a website and series of animated videos that highlights the connection between soil and all that we depend upon in our daily lives, provides an accessible, graphics-based introduction to soil science, and inspires young people with positive solutions to some of our most pressing global challenges.
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