People

Erone Ghizoni Santos is a Science-for-Policy Project Officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), working in the LULUCF group at the interface of forest ecology, climate change, and environmental modeling. His research focuses on forest carbon dynamics, biomass estimation, and land-use change, combining advanced remote sensing (e.g., GEDI LiDAR, Sentinel-2, SAR) with process-based models such as the Carbon Budget Model (CBM) to support evidence-based climate policy. He specializes in translating complex environmental data into actionable insights for mitigation strategies and sustainable bioeconomy planning. Before joining the JRC, he was a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he contributed to the development of monitoring systems to quantify changes in forest carbon stocks driven by land-use activities, including deforestation, degradation, and regeneration in the Brazilian Amazon. His PhD research examined the impacts of human-induced disturbances on tropical forest structure and microclimate temperatures in Southeast Asia. Earlier in his career, he worked on forest biomass estimation using remote sensing technologies such as airborne LiDAR and satellite imagery.