Laura Rez is a PhD student studying forest-atmosphere interactions in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Weizmann Institute, under the supervision of Prof. Dan Yakir. She has a B.Eng in Bioresource Engineering from McGill University in Canada and MSc in Environmental Quality Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In her PhD research, Laura works to bridge leaf-scale energy and carbon fluxes to that of the forest, with the aim to see the forest for the trees – and the soil. She combines machine learning modelling of historical data with advanced on-site measurements to determine how climate indirectly affects energy partitioning in the leaf, and the repercussions of this on carbon fluxes and the forest ecosystem. In a separate grant project, she is also studying changes in the dry season in Israel, and how they may be driven by changes in both atmospheric synoptic systems (top-down) and land-use change (local, bottom-up).