Michael Belitz is a global change biologist and eco-informatician interested in combining hierarchical modeling, data science, and field approaches to understand how insects and ecosystems respond to climate change, urbanization, and agriculture. His work integrates diverse data sources with computational tools to fill biodiversity knowledge gaps at broad spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales.

Dr. Belitz is motivated by the dual challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. Work in the lab takes an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to inform evidence-based conservation and climate adaptation efforts. Dr. Belitz is interested in developing innovative approaches to data collection that can rapidly fill entomological data gaps. He is also interested in uniting environmental and biodiversity data to scale analyses and to develop ecoinformatics tools to make existing data more useful and accessible to the ecological research community.

Prior to joining UW-Madison, Michael was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology, co-mentored across Michigan State University and the University of British Columbia.