Stephen Porder
Assistant Professor of Biology
Ph.D., Stanford University

My research lies at the intersection between ecology, geology, and biogeochemistry, and focuses primarily on understanding differences in nutrient cycling across tropical landscapes. The tropics are undergoing the fastest population growth and land use change on the planet, and as we add three billion people to the world (mainly in the tropics) over the coming century, we need to understand a great deal more about how these systems will respond to anthropogenic changes.   My interests are mostly in tropical rainforests, the jewels of biological diversity on land, which are currently undergoing almost unimaginably fast destruction.  Despite the importance of these systems from a whole host of perspectives, we know relatively little about how tropical forests work biogeochemically, how nutrients and energy flow through them, and what constraints there are on plant growth, forest regeneration, and sustainable land conversion. In this context, I try to identify biogeochemical patterns across landscapes, to understand how these patterns may affect the function and services of ecosystems, and to consider how to incorporate this variation into models for predicting the response of ecosystems to anthropogenic changes.  To do this my lab combines field work (shooting leaves with a slingshot is a must-learn skill!), chemical and isotopic analyses, GIS and remote sensing. 

Personal History

I grew up in New York City, but developed a love for the outdoors in places like Vermont and New Brunswick, Canada.  After graduating from an international high school associated with the U.N., I went to Amherst College, where I majored in history and wrote my senior thesis on the history of Vermont during its fourteen years as an independent republic (1777-1791).  During that time, I got hooked by geology, because it taught me to look at the natural world in a fundamentally different way than I ever had.  After graduating, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, since I was really interested in many different things, and I took time off to teach skiing while I decided.  I went back to get a M.S. in geology from the University of Montana in 1997, and spent the next three years teaching earth science to inner city kids in New York.  Finally I came across what would become my true intellectual passion, understanding the way the earth’s living systems function, and in 2000 I went back to get my Ph.D. in Ecology from Stanford University, where I worked on landscape and ecosystem development in the Hawaiian Islands.  I hadn’t completely left my geologic roots, however, as my post-doc (also at Stanford) was in the Geological and Environmental Sciences Department integrating tectonic geomorphology into my understanding of how ecosystems develop.  I started in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, and the Environmental Change Initiative, at Brown in January 2007, and am absolutely thrilled to be here.

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