Stephen Wood
Senior Scientist, Agriculture and Food Systems
New Haven, CT
Stephen Wood Senior Scientist for Agriculture and Food Systems in the Provide Food and Water team at The Nature Conservancy. © Andrew Benson/TNC
Areas of Expertise
soil science, agriculture, sustainability science, ecosystem ecology, nutrition
Publications
Biography
Dr. Wood is a Senior Scientist for Agriculture & Food Systems in the Provide Food and Water team at The Nature Conservancy.
Steve’s expertise is in soil carbon cycling. His work has focused on both the mechanisms of how soil carbon builds and decomposes, as well as on quantifying the agronomic and environmental benefits of soil carbon and organic matter. Steve works on TNC’s agriculture strategies, where he brings cutting-edge science to the organization's efforts to use agriculture to promote conservation, climate mitigation, and food production. Steve was the lead on a SNAPP working group to build targets for managing soils for conservation goals. The group developed the AgEvidence data platform showing the impact of conservation agriculture practices in the US Corn Belt.
Before joining The Nature Conservancy, Steve was a NatureNet Science Fellow with The Nature Conservancy and the Yale School of the Environment. Steve has a Ph.D. from the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology at Columbia University, where he worked with Shahid Naeem and Cheryl Palm; and was part of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at The Earth Institute, where he studied the impact of agricultural practices promoted by the Millennium Villages Project on soil nutrient cycling and microbial ecology. He also has a masters from the Yale School of the Environment and a bachelors from The George Washington University. He holds an appointment as an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment and is based in New Haven, CT. More information on Steve’s research can be found at his website.