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Ecologist William E. Schlesinger Named to Head Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences

Duke ecologist William H. Schlesinger, a teacher and researcher noted for his study of the impact of humans on the world's climate, has been named the new dean of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

Schlesinger's appointment is subject to formal approval by the university's Board of Trustees at its annual winter meeting this weekend. He will succeed Norman L. Christensen Jr., founding dean of the Nicholas School, who plans to step down in June and return to teaching and research.

Provost Peter Lange said Schlesinger "is the ideal leader for the next stage of the Nicholas School's development into the leading university institution for the study of environmental sciences and policy."

"Professor Schlesinger has combined a superb scholarly record with stellar achievements in raising the funding for major environmental science projects," said Lange, the university's chief academic officer. "He has been recognized as a scholar and leader in ecology nationally and internationally. We expect him to bring superb intellectual direction to NSEES while further increasing the school's international visibility and financial strength."

Schlesinger, 50, was selected from 122 candidates during a national search headed by Nicholas School Professor Randall Kramer.

"The search committee was most impressed by Bill's vision for the Nicholas School," Kramer said. "In addition to his broad understanding of the role of environmental science and policy in society at large, he has a keen appreciation for the school's undergraduate, professional and graduate education programs, and he is strongly committed to strengthening the school's research programs in the biological, physical and social sciences. He will be an outstanding dean and will build on the excellence that Dean Norman Christensen brought to the school during its formative years."

Schlesinger is James B. Duke Professor of Botany in the Department of Biology and holds a joint appointment in the Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the Nicholas School. He has taught at Duke since 1980 and currently heads the Duke Graduate Program in Ecology.

During the past decade, Schlesinger has been a principal investigator on a series of major research projects with more than $14.3 million in funding. His current research interests focus on the role of soils in the global carbon cycle and he is leading a government-sponsored experiment in Duke Forest designed to determine how forest vegetation and soils respond to the increased atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities.

Schlesinger also has worked extensively in desert ecosystems to see how they respond to global change. He has testified before Congress on a variety of environmental issues, was a member of the White House Panel for National Climate Assessment in 1999-2000 and is a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Global Change Research.

"The genesis of my environmental interest stems from a weekend program for high school students at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where field trips took me to the few remaining natural areas of northern Ohio," Schlesinger said.

"During the fieldwork for my first scientific study B the description of a virgin forest just outside Cleveland, I worked just ahead of bulldozers. The plight of the wildlife in that forest, where I had seen brown creeper and woodcock, in the face of suburban sprawl left an indelible impression on me. How much of nature can coexist with humans? With its publication in 1971, my first scientific paper provides the only remaining record of that forest's existence."

The Nicholas School got its start as the School of the Environment in 1991 when, under Christensen's leadership, it was formed to unite and expand upon existing programs at Duke's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies on the university's main campus and the Duke Marine Laboratory in coastal Beaufort. In 1995, the school was formally named the Nicholas School of the Environment when Trustee Peter Nicholas and his wife Virginia gave Duke $20 million to support the school's development. Earth Sciences was added to the school's name last December after the geology department moved into the school.

During the 10 years of Christensen's deanship, the school's faculty grew from 24 to 44, and the endowment increased from less than $5 million to $94 million, including 11 new endowed faculty chairs.

A key to the school's success, Duke officials said, is its approach to the study of the environment from an interdisciplinary perspective. It has collaborative efforts with a variety of other programs at Duke, including public policy, law, engineering, natural sciences, economics, and business, and with several departments in Duke University Medical Center.

The Nicholas School also is home to a number of research centers focusing on complex topics such as wetlands issues, business and the environment, marine biomedicine, environmental toxicology, environmental economics and tropical conservation.

"The school has an incredible breadth of faculty - probably a broader reach than at any other university in the nation," Schlesinger said. "Our opportunity now is to build on that wonderful foundation and develop programs in a few areas that are the best in the country."

Such foci will be the result of discussions with the faculty, he said, but one candidate where the school already is strong might be surficial processing - the study of how Earth's surface responds to human disturbances such as farming, road construction and mining.

"We've become the dominant geological force on the surface of Earth in terms of just turning over the crust and causing erosion and weathering," Schlesinger said. "I see that as a global change phenomenon with the increasing world population. We see it locally, but it's repeated globally.

"In North Carolina's Piedmont, for example, and here in the Research Triangle, the building of shopping centers and malls and housing developments puts an incredible load of fine sediment into a number of rivers, and that can dramatically change the way rivers look and act."

Schlesinger is a 1972 graduate of Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1976. He was an assistant professor of biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining Duke in 1980, moving up from assistant professor to associate professor in 1983, professor in 1988 and James B. Duke Professor in 1994. He was appointed professor at the Nicholas School in 1990.

He is the author or coauthor of more than 125 scientific papers and the widely-adopted textbook, Biogeochemistry: An Analysis of Global Change. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.