Jacob is a plant community ecologist interested in the controls over biodiversity, ecosystem function, and global change responses. He specializes in developing and empirically validating mathematical models which bridge ecophysiology, demography, and ecosystem function to capture the dynamics of diverse plant communities. Jacob aims to marry theoretical and empirical approaches to ecology, leveraging state-of-the-art techniques in applied math, statistical inference, software engineering, and high-performance computing as well as experimental design, remote sensing and data science. Jacob earned his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in 2018 and his PhD from Princeton University in 2024, where he worked with Steve Pacala and Jonathan Levine.

Currently, Jacob is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy at the University of Utah and Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Department of Environmental Studies, where he studies how species interactions modify ecosystem response to drought and warming.