Osvaldo Sala: Seeing Strong Promise in Environmental Change Initiative

By Wendy Y. Lawton

Earth is in trouble. The atmosphere is heating up, forests and fields are disappearing, oceans are being emptied of fish. How to slow this slide and prevent potentially ruinous effects on our health, our economy, our food supply -- even our national security -- are increasingly matters of public concern and debate.

Enter Osvaldo Sala (left), who arrived on campus in January. The Argentinian ecologist is charged with turning Brown's already strong scholars in ecology, geology, demography, economics, public health, and international policy into a powerhouse team. Dubbed the Environmental Change Initiative, or ECI, the team will tackle science and policy questions created by environmental problems on local, regional, and global scales.

Think of Sala as a coach -- one already busy recruiting, cheerleading, and strategizing. Says Mark Bertness, Robert P. Brown Professor of Biology and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology: "Osvaldo came in and just got right in the game."

Working with Warren Prell, a professor of geological sciences, Sala organized a lecture series on environmental change, which starts this fall.

With Brian O'Neill of the Watson Institute for International Studies, Sala is planning a two-day international conference at Brown September 15-16. The topic will be the causes of climate change as well as its impacts on people, the planet, and public policy. The conference will be an annual event sponsored by the ECI.

Sala has also created an ECI hiring plan. One tenure-track professor will be brought into the initiative each year for three years, with the first arriving in 2006. An administrative manager will be on board before the start of classes.

"I'm pretty excited," Sala says. "At Brown, we have a great mix of faculty, from demographers to geologists to biologists and ecologists. We have the partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory, giving us access to some top scientists, so we should be a key player in the global environmental change arena. That is what I want: For Brown to be an unavoidable stop in global change science and policy."

Chief of the ECI, however, is not Sala's only job. He is also Sloan Lindemann and George Lindemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and professor of biology. He is director of the Center for Environmental Studies. And he serves as an integral link to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, which teamed with the University in 2003 to create a new graduate program in biological and environmental sciences.

On these fronts, Sala helped raise $2 million to create an endowed professorship at the Center for Environmental Studies. He worked with Bertness and MBL faculty to create two new ecology courses. One covers the human impact on ecosystem functioning, to be taught at Brown in the spring. The other, to be taught in Woods Hole in January, is a short course on the mathematical modeling of ecosystems.

Sala is also working with Division of Engineering Dean Clyde Briant and other faculty members on a white paper that will propose bringing a strong environmental focus to the engineering curriculum. Briant would also like to hire new faculty who apply "green" principles to a variety of projects, from consumer products to construction.

Aside from these campus-based projects, Sala maintains other commitments. He is president of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment and a coordinating lead author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a United Nations-sponsored scientific program reporting on the health of the global environment. In May, he served as a chair of The Stony Brook World Environmental Forum, a climate change meeting convened by conservationist Richard Leakey.

Sala also continues weekly conference calls with his graduate students in Argentina to discuss their field research.

"Osvaldo is a combination of being a very good scientist and a very good man," says acclaimed Stanford University ecologist Peter Vitousek. "As a scientist, he's capable of seeing to the core of a question -- seeing the critical measurement that will settle it in a sea of possible measurements. In some, that insight is accompanied by arrogance. Not in Osvaldo. He sees other people and what they need and want very clearly."

At Brown, Sala sees strong promise -- and great responsibility -- when it comes to environmental science and policy.

"We teach the leaders of the next generation here," he says. "We may only graduate about 1,500 students a year, but they will all be CEOs, politicians, activists. Students ought to leave with a sense of the limitations of the planet, of the trade-offs we make. I want them to leave with the knowledge that there is only so much to go around."

Two years ago, Brown and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole forged an alliance to support research and education in biology, biomedicine and environmental sciences. Fruits of the partnership so far:

• MBL researchers with faculty appointments: 16
• Graduate students enrolled: 10
• New classes through Brown/MBL program: 6
• Joint faculty research collaborations: 3

Photo by Peter Goldberg