Julia Pongratz is a full professor for Physical Geography and Land Use Systems at the LMU Munich and leader of the Joint Group "Land Use in the Earth System" at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. Her studies of geography in Munich and at the University of Maryland naturally got her interested in the interaction of human activity and the natural spheres. She then investigated land use change as a climate driver throughout the last millennium during her PhD work (2006-2009) at the University of Hamburg, which won several awards. After a postdoc at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford, looking into food security and geoengineering, she established a junior research group at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology on “Forest Management in the Earth System” in 2013. She is member of the SSCs of two Coupled Model Intercomparison (CMIP6) projects and the Future Earth's projects AIMES (Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System) and the Global Carbon Project. In the latter, she coordinates the land use component in the annual carbon budgets. She has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, which received more than 8,000 citations, and contributes to the IPCC’s last and current Assessment Reports. Julia seeks to connect disciplines and serves as member of the Board of the Center for Ethics and Philosophy of LMU Munich, member of the Graduate Board of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, member of the Steering Committee of the German Alliance for Global Health Research, member of the Ecology Forum of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and is spokesperson of the Working Group “Modelling Human-EnviRonMental InTeractions In the ANthropocene (HERMITIAN)” of the German Committee Future Earth."