David Ackerly is the dean of UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources. Trained as a plant ecologist and evolutionary biologist, Ackerly has most recently been working on programs that bring together multidisciplinary teams to explore broad research areas including the effects of climate change on biodiversity, the integration of phylogenetics and ecology, and novel approaches to conservation biology. In the past decade, as a senior fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and member of the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology steering committee, he has been increasingly involved in data-intensive projects. He joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2005. Ackerly received his BA in biology from Yale University in 1984 and his doctorate from Harvard University in 1993. He is a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America, as well as a recipient of the Berkeley Graduate Division's Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award.