In this episode of Buff Innovator Insights, meet Dr. Jennifer Balch, associate professor of geography and director of Earth Lab—a project at CU Boulder and CIRES. Learn about how her work in places like Kenya and Amazon rainforests shaped her interests in the relationships between fire, Earth systems and people, and how she’s working to transform data into insights to help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.
Terri Fiez
Hello, I'm your host Terri Fiez, Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to Buff Innovator Insights, a podcast for science fans, creative thinkers, and lifelong learners. This podcast offers a behind the curtain. Look at some of the most innovative, groundbreaking ideas in the world. Even better, it's an up close and personal introduction to the people behind the innovations, from how they got their start, to how they are making tomorrow better for all of us.
Today. I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Jennifer Balch, Associate Professor of Geography and CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder. She is also a director of Earth Lab, a project at CU Boulder, and series that specializes in data intensive, open, reproducible, environmental science. Dr. Balch's research aims to better understand the role of fire on earth at a global scale. Her team examines how shifting fire regimens are reconfiguring tropical forests, encouraging non-native grass invasion, and affecting the global climate. As an undergraduate she studied ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, and she received her master's and PhD from Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
In this episode we'll learn how a summer trip to Kenya gave new focus to Jennifer's lifelong love of science, how a decade of studying fire in Amazonian rainforests gave her unique insights into the relationship between fire, earth systems, and people, and how her research and teaching seek to turn massive amounts of data we can now access into insights to solve our most challenging problems. Let's talk with Dr. Jennifer Balch.
Thank you for joining me this morning, Jennifer.
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, thanks for having me, Terri.
Terri Fiez
Really excited to learn more about you and to share that with our listeners. Let's go ahead and get started. You grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What was that like?
Jennifer Balch
It's cold. Yeah, it's cold most of the year there, but my dad was in the military, so we moved around a little bit, but I was also born at the tail end of my dad's career in the air force. And so I was born in Fairfield, California, but I grew up most of my life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And growing up, my dad wanted to keep me out of trouble, and so I played soccer, field hockey, and basketball in high school, and I think that's one of the places where I learned team dynamics and leadership skills, was through my strong love of sports, but also the strong encouragement that I got to get involved in all kinds of activities.
Terri Fiez
So what were some of your favorite subjects in school?
Jennifer Balch
I loved math and science, I loved asking questions, and I took this elective in my senior year of high school that was on experimental design, and I was able to design this experiment around brine shrimp, and secondary smoke consequences for brine shrimp, and I remember going through the catalog, ordering straight up nicotine, and I just designed this crazy fish tank that would smoke cigarettes for me and ingest the smoke back into the tank that held brine shrimp. I really have a lot to be thankful for in having some great high school science teachers who encouraged me to follow my nose.
Terri Fiez
So I have to ask, how did the brine shrimp respond to the secondhand smoke?
Jennifer Balch
Oh man, so a lot of them died. As you might expect. But the interesting part was looking at the differences between—because not only was I able to test the effect of secondhand smoke, I was also able to test the effect of primary smoke and inhalation, and then also just the direct effects of nicotine. So it was this really cool experimental design, and there was a gradation. That was one of my first goals at this way of thinking.
Terri Fiez
That's great. So how did you decide where to go to college?
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, so I applied to a lot of different schools, I can't even remember exactly how many, but probably a dozen. And I really wanted to go to Princeton, my parents had divorced when I was younger and I grew up mostly with my dad, and so I was really longing to be closer to my mom, she lived in Pennsylvania, which was not too far away from Princeton. And I got rejected. I got rejected, as many people get rejected from some of these institutions that are hard to get into, but I wrote them a letter. I wrote them a letter and told them they made a mistake and that they should accept me, and lo and behold they came around and accepted me.
So I think part of that story too is I don't give up. I hold on to ideas, I hold on to proposals and papers and I just keep pushing forward, and I think that's something that has also served me really well in my career is don't let rejection get in your way and slow you down. And the funny part, too, is that also happened to me in grad school. I didn't write a letter, but I got rejected from graduate schools the first time applied, all of them, and that could have been the end of my career had I let that moment deter me from pursuing graduate studies in science.
Terri Fiez
That must've been quite a letter.
Jennifer Balch
I know, I wish I could find that letter and just look at, wow, that must have been convincing. I wish I had those same tidbits or phrases now to fall back on.
Terri Fiez
That's great, that's really a compelling story. So when you went to Princeton, did you know what you wanted to study?
Jennifer Balch
No. I knew I loved science, I knew I loved asking questions, but the only thing that I thought you could do with a science career at that point was to go and be a doctor, a medical doctor, and so I was pre-med, I was taking all the pre-med classes. And this was another moment in my career that was pretty transformative, which was thinking about what I was going to do for a summer between my sophomore and junior years, and I reached out to a medical doctor I knew from my hometown, and he was going to Kenya, he did that frequently to provide services for remote hospitals. So I volunteered to go with him, and I spent a summer in Kenya.
But before I went I was doing some research in the library, I wanted to understand malaria and what the patterns were and challenges were around malaria for this region, which was about five hours north of Nairobi, and I was looking for this senior thesis that another student had written about this region and about malaria, and it wasn't in the library. So I went to the librarian and I was like, "People aren't supposed to check these out, and I was just wondering if you know where it might be," and she pulled me aside and said, "Okay, I'm going to tell you where it is, but you can't tell anybody I told you," and it's this professor has it, who's in the ecology and evolutionary biology department."
So I go knock on his door and I say, "Hey, I'm going to Kenya, and the librarian told me you have this senior thesis on malaria. Can I take a look at it?" And he said, "Oh, you're going to Kenya. You take a package for me." I was like, who is this guy, and what kind of package is he going to ask me to take? And it ended up being a birthday present for Joyce Poole, who is an incredible scientist and studies elephant communication, and I ended up then joining Joyce Poole and Samira and Louise Leakey, amazing paleontologists, out in the African Savannah, watching wildlife, and wow, that was a remarkable experience, and it also opened my eyes to, wow, you can have a career in studying the natural world.
And so I came back to Princeton after my trip to Kenya, and I went back to this professor's office, Andy Dobson, and I said, "I think I want to switch majors. I think I want to be an ecologist, whatever that means." And so that's what I did.
Terri Fiez
That's a great story. So you changed majors and you found your passion, what did you do then when you graduated from college?
Jennifer Balch
So I did a lot of odd jobs after college. I worked for the American Museum of Natural History for a summer internship after I graduated, that was an amazing experience. I ended up working for a law firm, a corporate law firm, for awhile, I was attracted to the idea that, oh, you can travel, and where they sent me was Trenton, New Jersey. I worked for a corporate law firm, I worked for the ACLU as a legal intern. I was like, I want to do something that matters. I had this amazing experience being able to study nature for the beauty of nature itself, but I really was searching for something that mattered for the more immediate, and our challenges around our environment. And I also then went to work for the Environmental Law Institute in DC, and after those experiences I came to the realization that I still loved asking questions, and I wasn't able to do that in those pathways, and I decided that I really wanted to go back to graduate school and I wanted to do more science.
Terri Fiez
So you said you applied to many schools, where did you end up going to after you finally, in the next cycle, were successful?
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, so first round, didn't get in. Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and go at it again. I only applied to three schools the second time around, and I got a little bit smarter, and I also decided to apply for some funding myself. I was like, you know what, I'm going to make this happen. And so I applied for an NSF graduate research fellowship, and I also applied for a Fulbright, and lo and behold, once those came through I got into all three schools I applied for, and I ended up going to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Terri Fiez
So tell us some about your research there and what it is you studied in your PhD.
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, so I studied Amazon forests and how they respond to fire. Fire is a critical tool that's used in frontier expansion, and so what I was studying in the southern part of the Amazon was essentially how Amazon tropical forests are sustaining the amount of fire that they're seeing today. And in order to do that, I was part of a large Brazilian American team that set up large scale experimental burns. I studied that process of what happens when you set fire to Amazon forests at different frequencies to see what their resilience was. I studied that for my PhD, which was about six years, and then I continued to study it for another four years. So about a decade of my life was spent literally tagging and following about 10,000 trees and how they were responding to this disturbance.
Terri Fiez
And then what did you do when you finished your PhD, after you'd completed this work?
Jennifer Balch
So after my PhD I proposed to do some work as a post-doc that was essentially looking at global fire patterns, like what's driving global fire patterns, what kinds of fuel do you need, what kinds of drag conditions, what kinds of sparks do you need for global fire to happen across different systems, from the tropics to the Tundra? And so I proposed that work and it was funded, and I spent four wonderful years in Santa Barbara at NCEAS, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, trying to tease apart, what were the global patterns and drivers of fire.
Terri Fiez
So after that I know you joined Penn State University, and then very shortly came to CU Boulder. What drew you to CU Boulder?
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, when the geography department here advertised a new faculty position trying to understand disturbance dynamics and climate change I was like, oh my gosh, this job has my name written all over it, and I couldn't resist also the opportunity to be in a place where fire matters. Boulder, Colorado, and the front range, and this place in the west is a place where fire is a threat, and fire matters to us a lot.
Terri Fiez
So shortly after you joined CU Boulder, campus launched the Grand Challenge, which are ambitious but achievable goals that harness science, technology, and innovation to solve important national or global problems, and you had a very interesting and revolutionary idea that you proposed, tell us about that.
Jennifer Balch
So I remember the email that I sent to a colleague asking, "Hey, I've got this idea, it's called Earth Lab, a data synthesis center for earth systems research, what do you think?" And when I came to Boulder, I mean one of the other draws for me too is this town is just chock full of earth nerds, data wizards, and space geeks, and I was like, wow, why doesn't Boulder have a synthesis center in the same way that Santa Barbara had, which is where I did my postdoc. And essentially the pitch was, we've got all this data that we've collected about our planet, we need to better understand it. We need to shift from the era of data to the era of insight, and we need to do it fast.
Terri Fiez
So you're now, what, five years into Earth Lab's founding. Where is it now, and what are you doing, and who are all your partners in this?
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, it's such a great question. We have an amazing education program that reaches over 200,000 unique users a month, our learning portal earthdatascience.org was just a glimmer of an idea just a few years ago, and it's really hitting on, there's a huge demand for learning new skills around earth and environmental data. I'm also super proud of our analytics team and our analytics efforts in terms of, gosh, how do we take machine learning and artificial intelligence, how do we take those techniques also to the wealth of remote sensing data that we have out there? And in terms of our discoveries and our science, we've built some really great partnerships, for example, with Zillow, where we've matched hundreds of millions of housing records with information on natural hazards to better understand our exposure and the patterns of vulnerability in our society in terms of where we put homes.
Terri Fiez
Do you use your science to help inform policy?
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, absolutely, and I would also say that we take a stance that science has a lot to offer, and we don't necessarily prescribe different pathways that policymakers should take, but we provide information that can be really valuable. And I've had many conversations with our Colorado representatives about what the science is seeing in terms of our wildfire problem. and is this going to get worse? Where is it going to be worse? Who's most vulnerable? How are we going to solve this problem? Because the science can help us inform those decisions.
And part of my drive to communicate the science, and last fire season I don't know how many journalists I talked to you, but it was dozens and dozens and dozens. I was like, look, I'm going to try and answer as many questions as I can, because part of the challenge is that we need to rethink how we are dealing with fire. We tried the experiment of putting fire out for 100 years, and it doesn't work, and it hasn't worked, and we need to absolutely rethink how we are building into flammable places, and how we are putting people at risk. So yes, absolutely do I get involved in those conversations and try and help where science can help.
Terri Fiez
That's amazing. You talked about some of the educational opportunities, or access that you're providing through Earth Lab. What are some of your favorite classes to teach?
Jennifer Balch
So I teach an introductory class to physical geography, it's essentially how the earth works across all of our systems. And I just, I flood that class with amazing imagery from satellites, from understanding snow patterns and dynamics, to understanding wildfires, and it's just incredible eye candy. And I think the students, once they see that, they see the power of what science can do and how it can help us understand, and it fulfills a science requirement. And so I also see it as an opportunity to inject a little bit of science into the students who may be following other career paths, so that they can appreciate a little bit about how science can show us how our earth system works.
And I also have had many female students in that class say to me, "Oh, I can't do science." Come to my office hours and say, "I'm really struggling in this class, I can't do science." And I'm like, "No, no, no, you can do science, absolutely." And I think part of it too, and this is part of what I hope my legacy is, is that showing other women that they can do science, and the world needs their discoveries too.
Terri Fiez
That's great. So my final question, as you think about the next decade or two, and the work that you're doing in understanding fire, and of course these have been very hot topics this last summer in particular, what is your hope for the future for your field, and do you think there are some breakthroughs that will be found that would really helped to advance the knowledge and the management of fires?
Jennifer Balch
Yeah, absolutely. I think the critical advance that we need on that front is science has to help us figure out how to live with changing fire, and I think we can do it. I think we can do the science that will help us navigate out of this really vexing wildfire problem. Millions, tens of millions of people were exposed to smoke from wildfires last year in the US. We've done the work that shows a million homes were within wildfire perimeters over the last two decades, and I think part of it is just, it's knowing what the problem is, but it's also science can help us figure out solutions to where's the best place to live, in terms of where do we develop? There's a lot of low hanging fruits in terms of how we're building into flammable places.
In terms of what do the next couple of decades bring, I mean, I think this is also critically where Earth Lab comes in, which is we need to shift away from the era of data to the era of insight, and we need to turn those mountains and mountains of data into wisdom that can help us figure out our most challenging environmental problems. And I also think what's coming next, and what needs to be more of an emphasis, is who's at the table, and big data has a big diversity problem. We need to make sure that anybody who wants data skills can get data skills, and I think what's also coming is our society is going to more and more be operating in code, and our second language needs to be a programming language, and we need to teach our students across all disciplines, where it makes sense, to increase their data skills, because it's going to be in the novel combinations of data, it's going to be in taking the data trash and turning it into data gold. Where are we going to find those new insights and new discoveries?
There's a huge number of discoveries that are going to happen because of the data that we're collecting about our planet and how people are engaging with our environment. One of my key motivations is that I do believe science is a gift. We developed a vaccine, we landed a Rover on Mars, we can absolutely contribute to how we live more sustainably and equitably on this planet.
Terri Fiez
We've been talking with Dr. Jennifer Balch, Associate Professor of Geography and Director of Earth Lab, a project CU Boulder and CIRES. You can learn more about Dr. Balch and Earth Lab at earthlab.colorado.edu. For more Buff Innovator Insights episodes, and to join our email list, visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host, and Vice Chancellor for Research Innovation at CU Boulder, Terri Fiez. It's been a pleasure being with you for this first season of Buff Innovator Insights. Innovation is for everyone, we can all make the world a more interesting and better place. Sometimes it just takes a spark. We'll see you next season.
