Rebecca Hernandez is assistant professor of land, air, and water resources at the University of California, Davis. Her work examines processes where human and natural systems interact and those that elucidate the functioning of the Earth system. Her research quantifies and informs exigent environmental issues in water-limited environments, including global environmental change, soil and microbial ecology, and renewable energy development. She has been pub­lished in jour­nals such as Bio­Science, Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy, New Phy­tol­o­gist, Renew­able and Sus­tain­able Energy Reviews, Nature Climate Change, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hernandez received a Ph.D. in earth system science from Stanford University and has a master’s in Biological Science. She was previously a UC President’s Post-doctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley where she specialized in soil ecology and energy policy.