Dr. Jenna T. B. Ekwealor is an Assistant Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University. Her research asks how life persists under environmental stress, from rapid physiological responses to long-term evolutionary and ecosystem change. She studies these questions primarily through mosses and biological soil crusts in dryland ecosystems, with growing work on how environmental degradation may affect air quality and human health. Her interdisciplinary approach draws on ecology, evolutionary biology, physiology, genomics, field research, and data science.

Dr. Ekwealor earned her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Chancellor’s Fellow and an NSF NRT Data Science for the 21st Century Trainee. A first-generation college student and graduate of California State University, Los Angeles, where she earned an M.S. in Environmental Science, she is a product of the CSU system and has experienced its transformative impact firsthand. She later held the Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution and a Department of Biology Postdoctoral Fellowship at Utah State University.

Her research has appeared in journals including Nature Communications, New Phytologist, and the Journal of Experimental Botany, and has reached broader audiences through NPR, Science Friday, The New York Times, Scientific American, and the book Atlas Obscura: Wild Life.