Fall, 2024
Principal Investigator
Dr. Chaoqun (Crystal) Lu
Chaoqun is a professor in the Department of Soil and Environmental Sciences at UW-Madison. She is a quantitative ecosystem ecologist, with a research focus on understanding and quantifying the complex ecosystem processes in response to climate change, land use and cover change, and human management across scales. Her primary area of interest includes estimation of terrestrial carbon sequestration, land-to-atmosphere greenhouse gas emissions, and land-to-aquatic nutrient movements by using process-based land surface models, and data-driven AI-empowered prediction tools.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Hai Huang
(hhuang549[at]wisc.edu)
Hai earned his Ph.D. in Land Use and Information Technology from China Agricultural University. Prior to moving to UW-Madison, he was a postdoc at Iowa State University. His research focuses on assessing and projecting agriculture-related land processes, integrating Earth observation data and machine learning into the process-based modeling frameworks.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Jiaqiang Liao
(jliao77[at]wisc.edu)
Jiaqiang earned his Ph.D. in Ecology from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on investigating terrestrial nitrogen cycling and its responses to climate change. He is currently developing integrated machine learning and process-based modeling frameworks to simulate nitrous gas emissions across scales.
PhD student, Soil and Environmental Sciences
Shuchao Ye
(sye83[at]wisc.edu)
Shuchao is a Ph.D. student in the program of Soil Science at UW-Madison. He received his Master’s degree in surveying and mapping from Central South University, China and completed part of PhD training at Iowa State University. His research interests include quantifying the impacts of land use and cover change, such as cropland expansion and CRP land enrollment, on the terrestrial carbon cycling and predicting the carbon sequestration potentials under conservation practices.
PhD student, Soil and Environmental Sciences
Xiaoqiong Chen
(xchen2528[at]wisc.edu)
Xiaoqiong is a Ph.D. student in the Environment and Resources program at UW-Madison. She earned her Master's degree in natural disasters at Beijing Normal University, China and completed part of PhD training at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on eco-hydrological processes in agriculture-dominated watersheds, data analytics and model-based flood risk assessment.
Lab Alumni
Chaoqing Song, Postdoctoral Researcher (2025), now a researcher at the Sun Yat-sen Univerity, China
Weihang Liu, Postdoctoral Researcher (2024-2025), now a researcher at Nanjing University, China
Bo Yi, Graduate student and Postdoctoral Researcher (2019-2025), now a postdoc at Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE), France
Fernanda Guerra Torres, Undergrad Researcher (2024-2025), now preparing for graduate school application
Linchao Li, Postdoctoral Researcher (2023-2024), now an associate professor at the Inner Mongolian Agricultural University
Qinsi He, visiting Ph.D. Student (2023-2024), now an associate professor at the Inner Mongolian Agricultural University
Yan Zhang, visiting Ph.D. Student (2021-2023), now a researcher in China
Ignacio Calderon, MS Student (2022-2024), now an environmental reporter for The Coloradoan
Peiyu Cao, Ph.D. Student and Postdoctoral researcher (2016-2023), now a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University
Jien Zhang, Postdoctoral researcher (2018-2022), now a quantitative associate at J.P. Morgan
Zhen Yu, Postdoctoral researcher (2016-2019), now a professor at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China
Alina Lu, Undergraduate Researcher (2017-2018), now a DMD student at Penn Dental Medicine
Avani Khadilkar, Graduate student (2017-2020), now a Bioinformatics Systems Analyst in the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute
Geunhu Kim, Graduate student (2019-2020), now in South Korea
