Institute fellow James Kellner has been appointed to named professorship as the new Peggy and Henry D. Sharpe Jr. Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies. Kellner, an assistant professor in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has been a faculty member at Brown since 2013. His research interests include investigating the structure of forests and trees over large geographic areas as well as how they are changing over time, especially in tropical systems.

Kellner studies these tropical systems, in part, by employing an autonomous helicopter called the Brown Platform for Autonomous Remote Sensing, or BPAR. He and his students combine BPAR's measurements with field studies, quantitative methods, and modeling to address questions in both basic and applied science from ecological and evolutionary perspectives. Kellner aims to address multiple problems with his work, including clarifying the role of tropical forests in the global carbon cycle, determining the importance of natural and anthropogenic disturbance in mediating interactions between tropical forests and the atmosphere, and the understanding the role genetic variation and phenotypic plasticity play in determining canopy chemistry.

Kellner's new appointment will take effect on July 1, 2016.