Hi! My name is Ngoc Nguyen (/knock/); I am a 4th-year PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Prof. Trevor Keenan. I follow the footprint of CO₂ fluxes in our ecosystems to understand the extent to which global vegetation and soil microbes capture and release CO₂ under current climate variability. My work has crucial applications in evaluating and informing nature-based climate solutions that utilize natural ecosystems as long-term carbon pools.
I synthesize large ecological datasets and apply novel machine learning approaches ranging from tree-based models to large language models (LLMs). My research uses in situ eddy-covariance observations, Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), and remote sensing data to model and predict global carbon fluxes and pools under high climate variability and elevated CO₂.
News
2025
October 15, 2025: We received grants from Google AlphaEarth (among 200 applicants!) to apply satellite embedded datasets in climate research!
July 31, 2025: My first PhD chapter is officially out in Nature Geoscience !
- Nguyen N.B. , Migliavacca, M., Bassiouni, M. et al. Widespread underestimation of rain-induced soil carbon emissions from global drylands. Nat. Geosci. 18, 869–876 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01754-9
April 25, 2025: Our paper, led by Luo X. and the team from the National University of Singapore (NUS), on estimating global vegetation carbon use efficiency (CUE) via eddy-covariance observations was accepted by Nature Ecology & Evolution !
- X Luo et al. [10 co-authors including N Nguyen] (2025). Global variation in vegetation carbon use efficiency inferred from eddy covariance observations. Nat Ecol Evol 9, 1414–1425 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02753-0
March 25, 2025: Our paper, led by H Zhang and the team at Tsinghua University, on estimating global stem respiration under thermal acclimation was accepted by Science !
- H Zhang et al. [13 co-authors including N Nguyen] (2025). Thermal acclimation of stem respiration implies a weaker carbon-climate feedback. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr9978
2024