I was raised in San Jose, California and came to love the oak woodlands and redwoods of central and northern California, the Sierra Nevada and the beaches of Santa Cruz County. I went to UC Berkeley and received an A.B. degree in Geography and that is where I first began to study environmental change. I was the first person in my immediate family to graduate from university. I would never have had the opportunities I have had without the University of California and I remain passionate in my support of what is the finest university system in the world - and the engine of California opportunity and prosperity.
My undergraduate degree was followed by a M.Sc. in Geography from the University of Calgary. A NSERC Postgraduate Fellowship supported my doctoral studies in Botany at the University of Toronto. During graduate school I also worked in the Arctic with the Geological Survey of Canada. The Arctic and Subarctic were to become passionate interests. My wife and I met because we were both conducting research in remote Arctic sites of Canada. I obtained a position in the Geography Department of McMaster University, Canada and was later appointed an adjunct faculty member in both Biology and Geology. In 1989 I was elected a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge and conducted research in the Botany Department there. In 1995 I relocated to UCLA as a Full Professor in the Department of Geography with a joint appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I served as the Chair of Geography at UCLA. In 2009 I was a Christensen Visiting Fellow at Saint Catherine's College at the University of Oxford. I was appointed a UC Presidential Chair and Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment in July, 2009.
The focus of my research is climatic and environmental change and the impact of such changes on ecosystems and humans. I am particularly interested in water resource issues in western North America and the subtropics and in Arctic climate change. Recently I have begun work on the impact of climate change on infectious disease in the tropics. I have worked in the United States, Canada, Russia, Mali, Mexico, Guatemala, Syria, Egypt and India. I use a variety of ways to study climate change and environmental change including meteorological data and climate models, field surveys, fossil pollen, plant macrofossils, tree-rings, fossil insects, elemental geochemistry, stable isotopes, population genetics and historical documents, artwork and maps. I also have used field surveys, remote sensing and GIS approaches to study modern environmental conditions. I have published over 120 peer-reviewed journal articles. These appear in the top disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, ranging from Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Ecology, Geology and Geophysical Research Letters to Nature and Science. I have published an award winning text on biogeography (Biogeography: Time, Space and Life, Wiley). My research has been supported by NSERC, the Royal Society of Canada, PAGES, NSF, the EPA and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Over the years I have received a number of honors for research and teaching. These include election as a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the University of Helsinki Medal, the Cowles Award for Excellence in Publication by the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group (1999 and again in 2004), and having a paper named as a Top 100 Science Story by Discover magazine. I have also won the McMaster University Award for Teaching Excellence and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.
In recent years I have become interested and active in questions of environment and sustainability. I am particularly interested in the nexus of scientific research, communication, resource management, policy and enterprise that is required to tackle the environmental and sustainability challenges of the 21st century. I have been active in the dissemination of information about climate change and environmental change to policy makers and the public. I have made invited presentations to local, state and federal officials in the United States and Canada including testimony for the US Senate Appropriations Committee. I have appeared in interviews on the NBC National News, NPR, BBC, Discovery Channel, CBC, National Geographic Online, local news outlets and was featured in a front page article in the Los Angeles Times (April, 2007). Recent media attention has focused on the concept of the ‘perfect drought’ which I have propounded in relationship to southern California and water resources in southwestern North America . In May 2007 I co-organized a Union Session on drought in the Americas during the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco , Mexico . An article regarding the conclusions of that meeting in terms of the potential for extended droughts in the 21st century appeared in EOS.
