Walter Jetz, MSc, PhD is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Adjunct Professor in the School of Forestry and the Environment at Yale University. In addition to being the Director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and leading the Map of Life, Dr. Jetz is the Scientific Chair of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

Dr. Jetz’ work addresses patterns and mechanisms of changing biodiversity distribution and the resulting implications on conservation and environmental management. His research combines remote sensing, phylogenetic, functional, and spatiotemporal biodiversity data with new modeling approaches and informatics tools. Dr. Jetz is particularly interested in how environmental, ecological, and macroevolutionary mechanisms combine to determine the co-occurrence of species and the structure of species assemblages.

In addition to his work at Yale, Dr. Jetz chairs the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Task Group on Biodiversity Indicators and is Co-Lead of the GEO BON Working Group on Species Distributions. Dr. Jetz was previously a professor of biological sciences at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Jetz earned his MSc in Integrative Bioscience and PhD in Zoology from the University of Oxford.

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