David Schimel served as a Senior Terrestrial Scientist in the National Center for Atmospheric Research Climate and Global Dynamics Division for 16 years, and was Founding Co-Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. He is an elected fellow of the Ecological Society of America and of the American Geophysical Union and has authored more than 150 papers on biogeochemistry climate impacts on ecosystems and the global carbon cycle.

Tapio Schneider studies atmospheric turbulence and its influence on the global climate, both on large scales (weather systems) and smaller scales (clouds). He develops theories of turbulence with the help of simulations and observations and uses them to understand and model climate changes and feedbacks that occurred over Earth’s history and that are likely to occur in the future. He also uses insights about fundamental aspects of atmospheric dynamics to understand phenomena on other planets, for example, the formation of jets on the giant planets.

John Worden’s background is in the remote sensing of atmospheric trace gases and the use of these data for investigating the carbon and water cycles, atmospheric chemistry, and their linkages. John served as the Principal Investigator for the Aura Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer, an EOS era satellite instrument that measures tropospheric composition of ozone and its pre-cursors, water vapor and its isotopologues, and carbon tracers such as CO₂, CH₄, CO, and OCS. Most recently he served as the JPL Earth Science section manager.