Profile of Dr. Osvaldo E. Sala

Sloan Lindemann Professor of Biology
Director, Environmental Change Initiative
Brown University
Box 1951, Providence, RI 02912
Tel 401 863-7793
Fax 401 863-3839
Osvaldo_Sala@Brown.edu

Current position: Sloan Lindemann Professor of Biology, Brown University

Education: Ph.D. Ecology, Colorado State University, 1982

Dr. Sala is the Sloan Lindemann Professor of Biology at Brown University and serves as the Director Brown University’s Environmental Change Initiative.  As president of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment and a coordinating lead author of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, he is an international leader in ecological science and global environmental policy.

Dr. Sala has explored several topics throughout his career, ranging from the consequences of changes in biodiversity on ecosystem function—an analysis that included the development of biodiversity scenarios for the next 50 years— to water controls on carbon and nitrogen dynamics in arid and semi-arid ecosystems. He is particularly interested in working with scenarios as a way of simplifying, understanding, and communicating the complex relationships that emerge from the study of social-ecological systems. He employs a wide variety of tools, especially direct observations, manipulative field experiments, and simulation modeling. He has worked in the Patagonian steppe, annual grasslands of California, steppes of Colorado, and deserts of Southern Africa; he currently has experiments in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico.

Sala has served as editor of Global Change Biology, the president of the Argentinean Society of Ecology, and as a member of the governing board of the Ecological Society of America.