Rate My Professor Tommaso Jucker

Dr. Tommaso Jucker is an Associate Professor in Forest Ecology and Global Change in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, where he leads the Selva Lab and collaborates with the Cabot Institute for the Environment. He earned his PhD in Forest Ecology from the University of Cambridge in 2015, an MSc in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation with Distinction from Imperial College London in 2010—for which he received the Southwood Prize for the best MSc dissertation—and a BSc in Biological Sciences cum laude from the University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2009. Jucker's professional career includes his current role as NERC Independent Research Fellow and Lecturer at Bristol since 2019, Research Scientist at CSIRO and Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia from 2017 to 2019, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge from 2015 to 2017, contributing to projects such as the Biodiversity and Land-Use Impacts on Tropical Ecosystem Function (BALI).

His research centers on the processes shaping the structure, composition, and function of the world's forests, employing manipulative experiments, long-term field observations, large-scale datasets, remote sensing, and modelling to predict responses to rapid environmental change and societal impacts, with key implications for climate regulation, biodiversity, and human livelihoods. Jucker has received major awards including the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2023, New Phytologist Tansley Medal in 2021, Founders’ Prize in 2020, Harper Prize (highly commended) in 2014, and President’s Prize in 2015. His influential publications include "Climatic controls of decomposition drive the global biogeography of forest-tree symbioses" (Nature, 2019), "Positive biodiversity-productivity relationship predominant in global forests" (Science, 2016), "Allometric equations for integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring programs" (Global Change Biology, 2017), "Stabilizing effects of diversity on aboveground wood production in forest ecosystems: linking patterns and processes" (Ecology Letters, 2014), "Crown plasticity enables trees to optimize canopy packing in mixed-species forests" (Functional Ecology, 2015), and more recent works such as "Beyond species means – the intraspecific contribution to global wood density variation" (New Phytologist, 2026).