In 2022, he was a Resident Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center studying ecological security topics. He served a decade in the U.S. intelligence community as the Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and as Senior Scientist and Senior Analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Prior to joining the government as a AAAS Diplomacy Fellow in 2009, he was a tenured Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Schoonover earned his PhD in theoretical chemical physics at the University of Michigan, where he studied complex systems.