Glen M. MacDonald
University of California, Los Angeles
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Primary Section: 64, Human Environmental Sciences Secondary Section: 63, Environmental Sciences and Ecology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Glen M. MacDonald is UCLA John Muir Memorial Chair of Geography and a Distinguished Professor. He is Co-PI for the Department of the Interior’s Southwest Climate Science Center. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, a MSc from the University of Calgary and an AB (Hons) from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on climate change, its causes and its impact on the environment and society. He works in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Particular foci have been Arctic-Boreal climate change and water in western North America and global semi-arid regions. He is known for work on rapid responses of treeline to climate change and the concept of the ‘Perfect Drought’. The author of >150 scientific and popular press pieces and an award winning book on biogeography, He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Bellagio Resident. He holds the University of Helsinki Medal, the AAG James J. Parsons Award and Henry C. Cowles Award, a Life Membership at Clare Hall Cambridge, a Visiting Fellowship at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and distinguished teaching awards from McMaster University and UCLA.
Research Interests
I am interested in the effect of past and present climate change on natural ecosystems, particularly forests, wetlands and lakes and on society. A large portions of my research has focused on northern high latitude climate change and included work across northern Canada and Russia. My interest in societal impacts of climate change focusses on, but is not restricted to, the effects of drought, particularly in the West and other semi-arid regions of the world in Africa and Asia. The interplay and feedbacks between societies and the environment are an increasingly important concern in my work. The climatic changes I study occur over periods of decades to millennia and I draw upon observational and historic records, but most often rely on paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental indices. The analytic tools I work with extend from sedimentology, geochemistry, palynology and other micro-paleontological approaches to tree-ring analysis.
