Marshall, Michael Thomas
Michael is broadly interested in the interaction of land surface processes with the atmosphere and how this interaction impacts agrarian society. After receiving his B.S. in physics from UCSD, he served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania. He received a Fulbright Fellowship after earning his M.A. in Environmental Science and Policy at Clark University to evaluate the socioeconomic impacts of climate change on the spread of malaria and cholera in communities around Lake Victoria.
He received his Ph.D. in Geography from UC Santa Barbara. His dissertation titled, Modeling Evapotranspiration in sub-Saharan Africa: A Tool for Food Security Analysis synthesized remote sensing and land surface reanalysis to parameterize a low cost and effective evapotranspiration model.
He was a Mendenhall Research Fellow with the U.S. Geological Survey. His project there used a suite of hyper- spatial and spectral remote sensing data, geographic information system (GIS) layers, and groundtruth data to estimate and evaluate crop water productivity for the primary irrigated crops in California.
He now is a climate change scientist for the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.