Duane Moser

I have conducted scientific research mostly focused on aquatic or underground environments on the U.S. Great Lakes and inland waters in Wisconsin and Washington State, North Atlantic, Southern Ocean, the Antarctic Dry Valleys and the deep subsurface in South Africa, Canada, and the United States. The underground work employs mines, natural caves, and boreholes from surface. I have published over 90 peer-reviewed papers, have appeared in the scientific and popular press many times and have numerous technical reports, white papers, and other works. My work has been cited over 7,700 times, with an h-index of 39 and i10-index of 63 (02/26/2026). Currently, my work focuses on life in extreme environments, astrobiology, emerging contaminants, using environmental DNA as a conservation tool, and molecular archaeology.

I have been an associate professor in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences at Desert Research Institute since 2017. Prior to that I was an associate or assistant professor in the Division of Earth and Ecosystems Sciences at DRI (appointed in 2005). I am adjunct professor in the UNLV School of Life Sciences, Department of Geosciences, and Water Resources Management. I did postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University in Geosciences and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I obtained a Ph.D. (With Distinction) in Limnology and Oceanography from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and the Center for Great Lakes Studies and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh and an associates degree in Reclamation/Geology from the University of Wisconsin, Platteville.

Chad Cross

Dr. Cross is trained as a multidisciplinary scientist. He received is PhD in Ecological Sciences (focus in Quantitative Ecology and Statistics) from Old Dominion University in Norfolk Virginia. He additionally holds several master’s degrees: Computational & Applied Mathematics/Statistics (Old Dominion University), Medical Entomology & Nematology (University of Florida), and Counseling (University of Nevada, Las Vegas). His undergraduate training was at Purdue University, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in biological sciences and the other in wildlife science. Dr. Cross has several active areas of research. These include: (1) Public Health: Investigations in population health related to chronic and infectious diseases, with special emphasis on quantitative methodology and use of large databases; (2) Epidemiology & Biostatistics: Applications of statistics and epidemiological principles to problems in the health sciences – for example clinical trials, multivariate models, and population sampling strategies; (3) Medical Entomology & Parasitology: Applied research and field work in arthropod-borne and parasitic diseases, including population-based estimation of disease burden and the intersection of medical entomology and forensic science; (4) Quantitative Ecology: Applications of statistics to problems in the environmental and ecological sciences – for example Bayesian models for estimating avian fatality around wind turbines and mark-recapture sampling; and (5) Psychometrics: Applications of statistics to problems in the psychological sciences – for example randomized controlled trials for interventions and pattern recognition for finding clusters of patients with shared pathology.