Dr. Richard Norby, UT Battelle Corporate Research Fellow in the Environmental Sciences Division, Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Joint Professor in the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, has been named a Fellow in the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Since 1981, Dr. Norby’s career has focused on ecological research on the responses of organisms and ecosystems to elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) and associated environmental variables. He fostered the transition of the discipline from short-term laboratory to multi-year, field relevant studies. This has allowed the science community to understand organism and ecosystem responses to elevated CO2 to reflect important biogeochemical cycling interactions and long-term adjustments through time. Dr. Norby’s work transformed understanding of vegetation responses to elevated CO2 through the addition of mechanisms responsible for constraining the overall response to enhancements in gross primary production including carbon allocation, mineral cycling, root-mycorrhizal-microbial interactions, and water limitation.
Currently, Dr. Norby is working with the international science community to establish a new elevated CO2 study in the wet tropical rain forests of Brazil that should provide critical insights on this globally important ecosystem. In addition, he is the task lead for Nutrient Constraints as part of the DOE-funded NGEE-Tropics project.
Dr. Norby has more than 185 peer-reviewed publications with 31 cited more than 100 times according to the Web of Science.
Dr. Norby is an editor of New Phytologist and was an associate editor of the Journal of Plant Ecology (2008-2016). He was a guest editor of a special issue and served on the editorial board of Ecological Applications (1998-2002). As a member of the board of the New Phytologist Trust, Dr. Norby has stimulated the establishment of workshops and symposia on wide-ranging subjects including biogeochemical cycling, climate change impacts, and global terrestrial modeling, to a broader plant sciences community.
The rank of AGU Fellow is given to individual AGU members who have made exceptional scientific contributions and gained prominence in their respective fields of Earth and space sciences. Since the AGU Fellows program was established in 1962, no more than 0.1 percent of the total membership of AGU is recognized annually. Sixty-one new Fellows will be honored at the 2017 Fall meeting for their leadership and scientific excellence in their respective fields.
Dr. Norby has a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College and a Ph.D. in Forestry and Botany from the University of Wisconsin. He is a member of the Ecological Society of America, the Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation, and the American Geophysical Union, and in 1995 was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and selected Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2016.
The American Geophysical Union is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences, and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit, professional, scientific organization representing nearly 60,000 members in 139 countries.
https://eos.org/agu-news/2017-class-of-agu-fellows-announced