Jessica Guo
Jessica Guo, PhD, Assistant Professor of Climate and Biology
Guo is a plant ecophysiologist and data scientist who explores how plants interact with their environment under extreme climate conditions, particularly in drylands experiencing potentially lethal heat and drought combinations.
Guo’s research is inspired by the effects of climate change on even the most drought-tolerant desert plants and their consequences for whole ecosystems. She combines her expertise in plant hydraulics and field ecology with a passion for reproducible workflows and Bayesian modeling. Her work seeks to understand plant resilience and vulnerability, contributing to a broader understanding of ecosystem responses to climate stressors.
As a co-principal investigator of an NSF-funded Research Coordination Network titled PSInet: a global water potential network, Guo works to build an extensive database of plant water potential, promoting cross-disciplinary research in areas such as plant and ecosystem ecology, remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling.
Guo earned her PhD in Biology from Northern Arizona University and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Utah and the University of Arizona, where she broadened her toolkit to address plant-climate interactions and taught research computing methods.