Team
Meet the Team
Brad Justice
Chief Executive Officer, Soil Metrics
As CEO of Soil Metrics, Brad brings a background in early stage technology startups. A serial entrepreneur, he is interested in engaging agriculture as a massive, solar powered biosystem to produce valuable outcomes for the health and well-being of humans and our environment. Prior to working with Soil Metrics, Brad co-founded Blue Prairie brands to supply food manufacturers with a healthy, whole-food ingredient high in the fiber inulin. He received a BS and MS from the University of Virginia prior to leading the science at the award-winning startup Global Cell Solutions.
Mark Easter
Co-Founder and Vice President of Research & Development, Soil Metrics
Mark has spent his research career studying ecosystem dynamics and carbon and nitrogen cycling at Colorado State University, Oregon State University, the University of Vermont, and the U.S. Forest Service. His work focuses on greenhouse gas inventories and greenhouse gas decision support systems in agriculture and forestry. Mark was the project coordinator for the COMET-Farm tool and technical lead for the Carbon Benefits Project for more than a decade, and contributed analyses to the COMET-Planner tool, the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory, as well as multiple IPCC reports on greenhouse gas inventory methods.
Mark has led or contributed to national-level inventories of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and forestry in the United States, Brazil, Kenya, Jordan, India, Spain and Italy. For more than two decades Mark has worked in greenhouse gas accounting and decision support systems, beginning with the IPCC’s first soil carbon decision support tool in 2000, and progressing through multiple generations of the COMET tools and the Carbon Benefits Project tool. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1982, and an M.S. in Botany with an emphasis in Physiological Ecology at the University of Vermont in 1991.
Hailey Summers
Director of Modeling & Technology, Soil Metrics
Hailey’s work focuses on quantifying environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions of agriculture processes and products using life cycle assessment. Life cycle assessment allows for a holistic understanding of environmental impact by quantifying different emissions through the entire life cycle of the process or product. Hailey also focuses on evaluating the economic performance of early-stage agricultural technologies through techno-economic assessments.
Hailey’s work has contributed to research on indoor cannabis, industrial crops, and water scarcity accounting. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Colorado State University in 2021, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Utah State University in 2015, and B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Utah State University in 2013.
Dr. Keith Paustian
Co-Founder, Soil Metrics
Director,
Soil Carbon Solution Center
University Distinguished Professor & Senior Research Scientist, Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University
Dr. Paustian is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and Senior Research Scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. A major focus of his work involves modeling, field measurement and development of assessment tools for soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions from soils. He has published over 250 journal articles and book chapters. Previous and current research activities include development models and inventory methodology used to estimate US soil C and N2O emissions that are reported annually by EPA to the UNFCCC; development of a web-based tool (COMET-Farm) for estimating on-farm greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sequestration used by the USDA and project-scale systems for GHG assessment of sustainable land management projects in developing countries.
He also serves as project director for the Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR), a consortium of universities, industry and government, researching the potential for sustainable bioenergy production from beetle-kill trees and forest residues. Professional service activities include Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC 2006 National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Methods and the IPCC 2003 Good Practice Guidance for LULUCF, serving on two National Academy of Sciences panel (2010, 2018) dealing with land use and greenhouse gas measurement issues, and was a member of the US Carbon Cycle Science Steering Group, which provides expert input to Federal Agencies involved in climate and carbon cycle research. He also served on the Voluntary Carbon Standard Steering Committee for Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) and on numerous other national and international committees involving climate and carbon cycle research. He is a Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America and 2015 recipient of the Soil Science Society of America’s Outstanding Research Award.
Amy Swan
Co-Founder, Soil Metrics
Project Scientist, Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University
Amy has worked on a variety of research projects that evaluate the impacts of agricultural management and land use change on greenhouse gas cycling in ecosystems. She contributed to the U.S. EPA National Greenhouse Gas Inventory for several years, as well as supported development of web-based tools to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from farms and ranches in the U.S. (COMET-Planner and COMET-Farm) and sustainable land management projects in the developing world. Ms. Swan’s experience in soil carbon research ranges from extensive on-farm/ranch soil sampling and analysis to simulating agricultural ecosystems in the Century and DayCent ecosystem models. In her MSc thesis research, she evaluated the socio-economic and environmental factors that affect adoption of carbon sequestering agricultural conservation practices in the U.S. and nitrous oxide emissions associated with those practices. She received a BSc in Environmental Management from South Dakota State University and MSc in Ecology at Colorado State University.
Kevin Brown
Co-Founder, Soil Metrics
CEO, Axios Software
Lead Software Engineer,
Paustian Group at Colorado State University
Since 2010, Kevin has helped architect and develop many software applications, most notably the COMET-Farm suite of applications. Kevin is also the director of the Research Software Facility at CSU leading a team of software developers and graphic designers continuing to work on COMET as well as other software development projects.
Our Partners
Soil Carbon Solution Center, Colorado State University
The mission of the Soil Carbon Solution Center is to develop applied soil-based solutions and bring them to scale, globally, as a key CO2 removal technology and to improve food, fiber and bioenergy production grounded in environmental, economic and social sustainability. The Soil Carbon Solutions Center conducts the research and builds the tools needed to implement meaningful soil carbon accounting at scale and measure the impacts on producer livelihoods.
Axios Software
Axios is Soil Metric’s software development partner, specializing in the transformation of science into scalable software tools. Its team of software engineers has extensive experience with Soil Metric’s underlying software having produced it at Colorado State University.
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