David Tilman
David Tilman, a prominent American ecologist and a Regent’s Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, will give a free public lecture at Gustavus Adolphus College at 2:30 p.m. Friday, May 14.
Tilman’s talk is titled “Can We Feed the World and Save the Earth?” and will serve as a preview to this October’s 46th annual Nobel Conference which is titled Making Food Good. Tilman’s lecture will take place in Wallenberg Auditorium, located in the Alfred Nobel Memorial Hall of Science.
Tilman’s most recent research on food, energy, and the environment takes a 50-year quantitative look into the future of food and energy, and proposes solutions to the problems that accelerating global food and energy demand would create. This work focuses on forecasting future global food demand, the resultant land clearing, loss of biodiversity and release of greenhouse gases, and ways to greatly reduce these two major environmental impacts. Tilman will also examine ways to help poorer nations adopt high-yielding agricultural practices and the environmental and health benefits of dietary shifts to highly environmentally efficient diets.
Tilman is a professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. He is also the director of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve Long-term Ecological Research Station. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the National Academy of Science. In 2000, Tilman was designated the Most Highly Cited Environmental Scientist of the Decade by Essential Science Indicators.
More recently, Tilman was awarded the 2010 Heineken Prize for Environmental Science by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tilman was the awarded the prestigious honor “for the way in which he combines mathematical theories, laboratory research, and field experiments to make a fundamental contribution to the science of ecology.”
The 2010 Nobel Conference will consider a wide array of food issues from human health to the health of planetary ecosystems; from nutraceuticals to culturally appropriate foods; from community gardening to fuel crops; and from genetic modification to food security.
Bina Agarwal, Linda Bartoshuk, Cary Fowler, Jeffrey Friedman, Frances Moore Lappe, Marion Nestle, and Paul Thompson will be the seven presenters at the 2010 Nobel Conference.
For more information about the 2010 Nobel Conference, go online to gustavus.edu/nobel. For more information about Tilman’s May 14 lecture, contact Professor of Physics and Director of the Nobel Conference Chuck Niederriter at chuck@gustavus.edu.
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