Beth Drewniak Joins ESS Team as Lab Detailee

October 2022

DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program is pleased to welcome Dr. Beth Drewniak to the Environmental System Science team as a part-time detailee for the next year. Beth has been an earth scientist in the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory for over 15 years. She is also a fellow with the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering since 2016. Her primary interest is understanding the role that human land management plays on water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles. Beth is particularly focused on the contribution of agriculture practices on climate change. She specializes in land surface modeling in Earth system models and is the lead developer of the agriculture model in BER’s E3SM. Her other research activities span a wide breadth of topics including land-use and land-cover change, root dynamics, optimization techniques for biomass allocation, chemical transport of mercury, biogenic emissions, uncertainty quantification and parameter calibration of climate models, and urban landscape impacts on climate. She received her master’s degree in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her PhD in biology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Beth has a passion for mentoring and serves as the Postdoc Mentor Coordinator for the Environmental Science Division at Argonne. She recently completed facilitator training for a pilot mentor education program at Argonne and other national laboratories. Beth has participated in review panels for DOE and served on organizing committees for a variety of workshops including the Scaling Root Processes Workshop and two urban-focused workshops. Recently, she served on the organizing committee for the DOE workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability and chaired the land session. Over the next year, her expertise in modeling will help ESS in workshop planning, identifying reviewers for various activities, and planning the next ESS PI meeting.