Rachel E. Gallery

Dr. Rachel E. Gallery is the Thomas E. Lovejoy Endowed Chair in Biodiversity, Conservation Science, and Policy and Professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona.

As the founding Director of the Lovejoy Center for Bridging Biodiversity, Conservation Science, and Policy in the Arizona Institute for Resilience, Gallery builds opportunities to understand and communicate the value of conserving global biodiversity and catalyzes actions and policies to protect it.

With an emphasis on enhancing equity and inclusion in STEM, Gallery’s research focuses on the biodiversity, conservation, and ecology of soils and on sustaining ecosystem resilience in the face of wildfires, droughts, species invasions, and climate change. Specific research foci include (I) investigating the ecological factors that determine how species diversity can be maintained in terrestrial communities, (II) scaling from “molecules to watersheds” to understand the dryland biogeochemical cycling responses to woody plant encroachment and drought, (III) disentangling the bio- and geo-chemical controls on ecosystem recovery, soil formation, and landscape evolution in wildfire-prone landscapes, (IV) testing the hypothesis that climate warming causes changes to ecosystem carbon balance in alpine wetlands through the co-responses of plants and soil microbiomes, and (V) investigating the consequences of plant invasions on plant-microbe interactions and outcomes for native plant restoration in coastal dunes.

A Fulbright Scholar and a former fellow and current member of the American Association of University Women, Gallery serves on nonprofit advisory boards, international working groups, and proposal review panels, and regularly speaks at local outreach events and international conferences.

Gallery earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in Biology from American University. A former Research Fellow of Wolfson College and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford, she was also a Staff Scientist at the National Ecological Observatory Network before joining the University of Arizona faculty.