Neil Pederson is a Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest who studies the dynamics and long-term development of forests from individual trees to trees across regions and subcontinents. He is especially interested in the response of trees as they interact with climate and as they interact amongst themselves. Neil conducts basic and applied research to help develop ecologically-based, long-term forest management. He digs natural history, charismatic megaflora, and old-growth forests. Neil is also very curious about the growth, longevity, and ecology of broadleaf trees and forests.
Neil earned an associate degree in math while playing lacrosse at SUNY-Morrisville, received his bachelor’s degree from SUNY-College of Environmental Science & Forestry, and received a Master of Science from Auburn University studying an old bottomland hardwood forest in South Carolina. After a stint as a tree-ring technician assisting on climate change research in Mongolia and Russia at the Tree-Ring Laboratory of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, he earned a Ph.D. studying forest ecology and climate change along the eastern coast of the United States at Columbia University. Before becoming a senior ecologist in the Fall of 2014 at the Harvard Forest, Neil was an assistant professor in biology at Eastern Kentucky University and a research professor at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.
He currently has grants with the US Forest Service and National Science Foundation to study the impacts of extreme climate on the lives of trees in the Northeastern US and how climate might have shaped the old-growth forests we love today.

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