Woody Turner
Program Scientist, Biological Diversity
Woody Turner is the Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and the Assistant Program Manager for Ecological Conservation in the NASA Headquarters Earth Science Division. He is also the overall lead for the Biosphere element within the division.
As program scientist, he oversees the agency’s basic research efforts to use satellite-derived information to understand the relationship of biodiversity to other components of the Earth system, focusing both on the drivers of biodiversity change and biodiversity’s impacts on the broader Earth system. The NASA Ecological Conservation Program is an applications activity seeking to bring together satellite and in-situ observations with ecological models to support decision making for conservation biology, natural resource management, and sustainable regional development.
Born in Nashville, TN, Woody graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1982 and earned master’s degrees in public affairs from Princeton University in 1987 and in conservation biology from the University of Maryland in 2001.