Atmospherica is led by three UArizona professors with extensive experience in all key aspects of the project: Dr. Joel Cuello is Professor of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, and Director of the Global Initiative for Strategic Agriculture in Dry Lands. Joel is also the inventor of the low-cost photobioreactor system used by Atmospherica.
Professor Daniel Apai, Atmospherica’s Founder, is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist. He is known for his studies of planetary atmospheres and habitability, and is leading major space technology development projects and NASA-funded astrobiology research projects.
Professor Joel Cuello of University of Arizona’s BIO5 Institute and director of the Global Initiative for Strategic Agriculture in Dry Lands demonstrates his Arizona Green Box, a portable vertical farming prototype on the UA Campus. (Photo:Bob Demers/UANews)
Dr. Regis Ferriere is an associate professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UArizona, and Professor at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. He is also the Director of the ENS-CNRS-UArizona Interdisciplinary and Global Environmental Studies Center. Regis is an expert in mathematical modeling of ecological systems from local to global scales, especially microbial communities and their interactions with the atmosphere and climate.
Dr. Martin Schlecker is an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, where he studies the characteristics of planets outside our Solar System. He contributes to Atmospherica with system-level modeling, life cycle analyses, and the optimization of our carbon-dioxide removal solutions.
Jack Welchert, PhD candidate, specializes on photo-bioreactor-based microalgae.
