Peter E Thornton
Interim Environmental Sciences Division Director, Corporate Fellow, Director of Climate Change Science Institute
Bio
Dr. Peter Thornton studies the interactions of land ecosystems with all other components of the Earth system, including biogeochemical and physical land-atmosphere feedbacks, and interactions with human systems. His research spans spatial scales from organisms to the global Earth system, and involves model development, model evaluation against observations and experimentation, and model applications to discover emergent properties of ecosystems. A special focus of his research is the coupling of carbon, water, and energy cycles with the biotic and abiotic cycling of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus which limit growth and metabolism of plants and microbes. Other primary research topics include the influence of disturbances on biogeochemistry-Earth system feedbacks, model evaluation and uncertainty quantification, biometeorology, and applications of artificial intelligence in Earth system modeling.
Dr. Thornton has been a member of the scientific staff at ORNL since 2008 and is an ORNL Corporate Fellow. He currently serves as the Interim Division Director for the Environmental Sciences Division (ESD). ESD is home to ~170 research and technical staff with expertise in Earth systems science, biodiversity and sustainability science, and Earth system informatics and data discovery. ESD researchers conduct experimentation in field and laboratory settings and develop and apply numerical models across scales from organisms to the fully coupled Earth system.
Dr. Thornton also serves as Director of ORNL's Climate Change Science Institute (CCSI). Established in 2009, CCSI is an intellectual home to researchers from across ORNL's directorates and divisions who engage in some aspect of climate change research. CCSI also supports a program dedicated to the application of ORNL's deep climate science knowledge and expertise to serve the emerging needs of stakeholders in the Southeast region, the nation, and the world.
Dr. Thornton has served as a mentor to technology projects within the Oak Ridge Public Schools and is a board member for the Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation.
ResearcherID: B-9145-2012
ORCID: 0000-0002-4759-5158