Dr. Richard (Skee) Houghton discovered a surprising disconnect between the fields of ecology and global carbon modeling when he was a graduate student, and he has spent his career working to bridge that gap. Dr. Houghton is an ecologist who studies the role that terrestrial ecosystems play in climate change and the global carbon cycle. His early work highlighted the importance of land use changes in generating carbon emissions. While he works primarily with empirical carbon bookkeeping models, he is constantly looking for the basic biological and ecological processes that could explain the results they generate.