Mukund Palat Rao is an Ecoclimatologist and Carbon Cycle Scientist. He received his PhD from Columbia University following which he was a NOAA Climate & Global Change fellow at University of California Davis. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the CREAF, Spain. His research aims to illuminate the future of ecosystems and the forest carbon cycle in a changing climate by drawing on his expertise in climate science, plant ecophysiology, dendrochronology, earth system models, and remote sensing. His research spans a broad array of spatial and temporal scales from cells to satellites and seconds to centuries. He is currently working on projects related to the role of tree growth in the forest carbon cycle, the vulnerability of forests to increasing heat waves, and the use of dendrochronology to understand past environmental change and timber transport.