Biosketch
Emily S. Bernhardt, PhD, is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and current Chair of the Department of Biology at Duke University. She earned her B.S. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and the University of Maryland before joining the Duke faculty in 2004. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Freshwater Science, and NAS. She has been President of the Society for Freshwater Science and is the President Elect for the Biogeoscience section of the American Geophysical Union. Awards include the Mercer Award from ESA, the Hynes Award from SFS, the Yentsch-Schindler award from ASLO, and a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Research Interests
Dr. Bernhardt's research measures the impacts of global environmental change (including urbanization, N deposition, rising CO2, sea level rise, land use change, and chemical pollution) on watershed biogeochemistry and aquatic ecosystem structure and function. In her work she endeavors to not only better define the scope of the challenges ecosystems are facing but to also identify and test the capacity for human intervention to mitigate or minimize these impacts in order to sustain ecosystem structure and function.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2023
Primary Section
Section 63: Environmental Sciences and Ecology
Secondary Section
Section 64: Human Environmental Sciences