Prof. Thomas C. Harmon is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a Founding Faculty member at the University of California Merced, where he also serves as the Director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, an organized research unit overseeing the work of 60 faculty and professional researchers. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Merced, he served on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. His teaching and research interests focus mainly on developing technologies and approaches to monitor, model, and sustain environmental systems. He also works regularly on identifying pathways toward solving complex socio-environmental problems, most recently as the Director of the University of California multi-campus research program on Labor and Automation in California Agriculture: Equity, Productivity, and Resilience and in the design of the UC Merced Experimental Smart Farm. He has a B.S. degree in civil engineering from Johns Hopkins University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in environmental engineering from Stanford University. Working with other leading environmental engineers and scientists, Dr. Harmon co-authored the National Academies 2019 report Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing the Grand Challenges.