College Wide Colloquium - Nobel Conference Preview EventMay 14, 2010 at 2:30–4 p.m.

On Friday, May 14, at 2:30 pm, Professor David Tilman will help us prepare for Nobel Conference 46, Making Food Good, with his lecture "Can We Feed the World and Save the Earth? e His most recent research on food, energy and the environment takes a 50 year quantitative global look into the future of food and energy, and proposes solutions to the problems that accelerating global food and energy demand would create. This work focuses on forecasting future global food demand, the resultant land clearing, loss of biodiversity and release of greenhouse gasses, and ways to greatly reduce these two major environmental impacts. He will examine ways to help poorer nations adopt high-yielding agricultural practices and the environmental and health benefits of dietary shifts to highly environmentally efficient diets.

G. David Tilman is a prominent American ecologist who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1976. He is Regent's Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, as well as an instructor in Conservation Biology; Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; and Microbial ecology. He is director of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve Long-term Ecological Research station. Tilman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the National Academy of Science. In 2000 Tilman was designated the Most Highly Cited Environmental Scientist of the Decade by Essential Science Indicators and in 2008, he was awarded the International Prize for Biology.