Glen MacDonald (Chair), FRSC

Glen M. MacDonald holds an endowed Chair in Geography, is Director of the White Mountain Research Center, Chair of the UCLA Canadian Studies program, and a UCLA Distinguished Professor. He is former Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He is a Co-Principal Investigator for the Department of the Interior’s Southwest Climate Science Center. Glen holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, a M.Sc. from the University of Calgary and an AB (Hons) from University of California, Berkeley. His research centres on climate change and its impacts. He works in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Particular foci have been Arctic-Boreal climate change, drought and water resource, and wetland dynamics and rates of carbon sequestration. He is known for work on responses of treeline to climate change, the concept of the “Perfect Drought,” and large-scale syntheses of developmental histories and carbon stocks in peatlands and coastal marshes.

Dr. MacDonald is the author of over 180 scientific papers in addition to popular press pieces and an award-winning book on biogeography. He is committed to broader communication of science and speaks widely to the public and policy makers. He has provided presentations and testimony to California state agencies and the US Senate Appropriations Committee.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; a Member of the National Academy of Sciences; a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association of Geographers; 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, and has held Visiting Fellowship at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and St Andrews. He holds distinguished teaching awards from McMaster University and UCLA.

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