The Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management Seminar Committee will host Dr. Stephen Porder of Brown University as he presents "Feeding 10 Billion" on Friday, March 30, at 3:10 p.m. in 210 Bessey Hall.

Porder received a master of science in geology from the University of Montana in 1997 before coming across his "true intellectual passion, understanding the way the earth’s living systems function." He earned his Ph.D. in ecology in 2000 from Stanford University where he worked on landscape and ecosystem development in the Hawaiian Islands. His post-doc at Stanford was in the Geological and Environmental Sciences Department "integrating tectonic geomorphology into my understanding of how ecosystems develop." His career at Brown began in 2007. He is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and fellow in Brown’s Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

His 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. 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."

His two main research foci are intact tropical forests and the consequences of their conversion to agriculture.