Previously, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the AgCenter. She is an earth systems scientist interested in land-cover and land-use change in the tropics and its impacts on ecosystems services, particularly carbon and nitrogen fluxes. She has used remote sensing and ecosystems modeling to estimate historical and future greenhouse gas emissions. She has worked on carbon and nitrogen dynamics in a range of settings, from the large-scale soybean farms of Mato Grosso, Brazil, to small-holder agricultural systems of Malawi and East Africa undergoing the 21st century African Green Revolution. In addition to these research projects, Gillian teaches courses at the Gund Institute.