Glen MacDonald, a distinguished professor at UCLA and member of the National Academy of Sciences, will visit CSUF on April 9 to give a seminar on his research about wildfires in California. Hosted by the Department of Geological Sciences, the seminar will take place in Gordon Hall, Room 252, from 4-5 p.m.
The talk will focus on California wildfires in the present, past and future. MacDonald is the endowed chair of California and the American West in geography at UCLA. He was formerly the director of the UCLA Institute of Environment and Sustainability. MacDonald works on issues of long-term climatic and environmental change and the impacts of such changes on ecosystems, fire, natural resources and human societies. He has published more 200 peer-reviewed articles and an award-winning book on biogeography. He has also published op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee. He has been interviewed extensively by the media on wildfires in California.
MacDonald is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Geophysical Union, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a Guggenheim fellow, a visiting global fellow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and a visiting fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. In 2019, MacDonald was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was a co-principal investigator on the Department of Interior’s Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and led its consensus study on the factors driving California’s increasing wildfire challenges. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Environmental Change and Society and, along with Janet Franklin, developed a special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on climate change and California sustainability.