John L Field

John L Field

R&D Staff Member

John Field is a R&D Staff Member in the Bioresource Science & Engineering Group within the ORNL Environmental Sciences Division. He studies the performance of bioenergy systems and carbon dioxide removal approaches at the intersection of ecosystem modeling, life cycle assessment, and sustainable land use planning. His expertise is in using process-based ecosystem models such as DayCent to evaluate the effect of biomass feedstock production on ecosystem carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions. He is a member of the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, and leads a shared research objective on soil carbon modeling across the four DOE-funded Bioenergy Research Centers. He has previously contributed to the Land Cover and Land Use Change chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2), and was a reviewer for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report on Current Methods for Life Cycle Analyses of Low-Carbon Transportation Fuels. His research has been highlighted in NatureNature Energy, Grist, Ars Technica, and The Guardian. Specific research interests include:

Bioenergy system modeling—Notable publications explore bioenergy landscape design for soil carbon sequestration (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-018-0088-1) and how carbon capture and storage could improve the mitigation value of bioenergy compared to alternative natural climate solutions (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1920877117). John has also worked on winter oilseed crops, pyrolysis and gasification systems that co-produce biochar, modeling mountain pine-beetle affected western forests, and marginal land identification.

Role of bioenergy in decarbonization—Since joining ORNL, John has had the opportunity to work on large, collaborative projects exploring the roles of biomass supply and bioenergy production in national and global-scale decarbonization scenarios, including:  

Enhancing soil carbon storage—John currently leads an ORNL LDRD project on the role of plant root exudation in soil carbon cycling, with activities including:

  • Fieldwork to identify genotype-level differences in soil carbon storage across a diverse population of black cottonwood (P. trichocarpa) maintained by CBI. 
  • Sampling and metabolomic analysis of root exudates in the same system. 
  • Linking process-based soil carbon models to automated laboratory and field measurements to facilitate iterative model-experiment (ModEx) synthesis. 

John was previously a research scientist at the Colorado State University Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. He earned his PhD from Colorado State University Department of Mechanical Engineering, co-advised by Dr. Bryan Willson (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering) and Keith Paustian (Dept. of Soil & Crop Sciences). There he had the opportunity to collaborate with crop scientists, ecologists, and economists as a fellow in the Multidisciplinary Approaches to Sustainable Bioenergy NSF IGERT program. Prior to that, John received his BSc from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, and spent several years in the private sector doing R&D on small-scale solid oxide fuel cell power systems.

When John isn’t writing or coding, he likes to be hiking, skiing, or trying to keep up with his red heeler puppy.   

2015    Sustainability Leadership Fellowship through the CSU School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES)

2012    Outstanding Graduate Research Award, American Society of Agronomy (ASA) Environmental Quality Section: Biochar Community

2011    C2B2-Chevron Graduate Fellowship, Colorado Center for Biofuels and Biorefining

Colorado State University, PhD, 2015. 

Case Western Reserve University, BSc, 2005.