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Curriculum Vitae
Eric Lambin is born in
Belgium on September 23rd, 1962. He obtained in 1985 a Master in
geography and a baccalaureate in philosophy at Université catholique de
Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve. In 1988, he defended a PhD in the same
university, based on his research on the application of Earth
observation satellites to better understand interactions between farming
systems and desertification in the African Sahel.
After a postodoc at the
Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, in Ispra (Italy), he
was hired as Assistant Professor at Boston University. He joined a
research team that is very active in NASA programmes on Earth
observation by remote sensing for global environmental monitoring. He
then returned to the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in
Ispra to analyse new time series of satellite data that had just become
available.
In 1995, he was hired as
Professor at the Geography department of Université catholique de
Louvain (UCL), in Louvain-la-Neuve, and was promoted as Full Professor
in 2005. He leads a research team that is involved in several
international scientific projects on human-environment interactions in
different parts of the world. These projects combine remote sensing,
socio-economic data, and spatial models to better understand and predict
terrestrial ecosystem dynamics and their impacts.
In 2002-2003, Eric
Lambin was invited as fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study of
Stanford University in California. Starting the 2009-2010 academic year,
he will share his time between UCL, where he remains Professor, and
Stanford University, were he will occupy the Inaugural
George and Setsuko Ishiyama
Provostial Professorship
at the Department of Environmental Earth System Science, School of Earth
Sciences, and Woods Institute for the Environment.
Eric Lambin published
more than 100 scientific papers in international journals specialised in
environmental sciences. He also published two books for a broad
audience: “The Middle Path” University of Chicago Press (translated from
“La Terre sur un fil” Editions Le Pommier) and “An Ecology of Happiness”
(to be translated from “Une écologie du bonheur”, Editions Le Pommier).
Invited to give talks in many universities worldwide, he also spends
several weeks per year doing fieldwork in drylands and tropical forests
of Africa, Asia and Latin America. So far, he has been supervisor of 22
PhD theses defended or in progress, and has supervised about 30 research
assistants who are employed today in various scientific institutions
worldwide.
From
1999 to 2005, Eric Lambin has been Chair of the international scientific
project Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC)
of the
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and
International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change
(IHDP).
He also contributed to the United Nations programme Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment. He is often consulted by international
organisations on issues related to tropical deforestation,
desertification, environmental impacts of biofuels, and the potential
role of tropical forests in mitigating climate change.
Eric Lambin is member of the
“Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de
Belgique” and is associated member of the “Académie
Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer de Belgique”.
In 2005, he
occupied the “Chaire Francqui au titre belge” at KULeuven. In 2009, he
was elected as Foreign associate at the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences, one of the five Belgians only to receive this honour so far.
He is married with
Régine Geets, who works as an executive in the pharmaceutical industry.
They have two daughters, Tatiana (1991) and Julie (1993). Eric and
Régine Lambin share a long-dating passion for horse riding. Eric Lambin
has also passions for modern jazz, literature and mountain climbing.
* * *
Scientific activities
Eric Lambin’s research
has contributed to a better understanding of human-environment
interactions in terrestrial ecosystems, thanks to new methodological
approaches.
At the start of the
1990s, he developed a method to detect changes in vegetation cover and
terrestrial ecosystem dynamics at regional scales based on time series
of wide-field-of-view Earth observation satellites. The application of
this method highlighted a range of interannual variations in vegetation
that were often ignored in previous environmental studies. This work
contributed, for example, to a better understanding of the geographic
distribution of biodiversity and the dynamics of forest and savannah
fires in Africa.
In parallel, Eric Lambin
developed, and then applied to several case studies worldwide, an
integrated approach to study human-environment interactions. It links
remote sensing and socio-economic data at a fine level of
disaggregation. This approach, at the interface between natural and
social sciences, allowed for a better modelling of causes and impacts of
tropical deforestation, desertification, and conflicts between wildlife
and agriculture around large African national parks. These studies
concerned mostly Africa, but also China, Thailand, the Amazon,
Indonesia…
Since the 2000s, the
research team of Eric Lambin broadened its interest to responses by
rural communities to environmental changes. Attention is being paid to
non-linear transformations of terrestrial ecosystems, and on critical
thresholds and feedbacks that slow down or accelerate these changes. For
example, a research project analyses the transition from net
deforestation to net reforestation that is taking place since a few
years in some developing countries, including Vietnam, China, Bhutan and
Costa Rica. These projects also concern strategies adopted by rural
communities to adapt to and anticipate climate change in semi-arid
regions of the African Sahel and Mediterranean Europe.
More recently, the
research team of Eric Lambin started to study the impact of land change
on emerging or re-emerging diseases that are transmitted by vectors
(ticks, mosquitoes, flies) and/or that have an animal origin (zoonoses).
An integrated analysis at the landscape scale allows a better
understanding of interactions between changes in ecosystems and climate,
the ecology of vectors and animal hosts of infectious agents, human
behaviour and land use, and agricultural practices. These interactions
often contribute to disease emergence. These latter research projects in
spatial epidemiology are highly interdisciplinary.
The
research work of Eric Lambin helped to identify the conditions under
which a society adopts more sustainable practices when using the natural
environment. It also contributed to the emergence of a theory of
human-environment interactions. This research also highlighted a limited
suite of pathways associated with deforestation, desertification or
ecological restoration of ecosystems. Identifying these generic pathways
improved predictions of human transformations of terrestrial ecosystems,
despite the great complexity of human-environment interactions.
* * *
Report of the Jury
(May 5, 2009)
Eric Lambin has developed a
method for quantitative analysis of land modifications based on remote
sensing and has pioneered the integration of biophysical and
socio-economic data to analyze the role of human activity and climatic
factors in land-cover change. In particular, his development of
change-vector analysis has opened up the quantitative assessment of land
use and land cover changes brought about by a variety of human and
climatic factors, both local to and remote from the areas affected by
those changes. He has been able to integrate a variety of disciplines,
from anthropology to space systems’ physics to describe and explain how
land use and land cover have changed up to the present. By using
multi-agent simulation methods, Eric Lambin has been able to interpret
the changes that he has quantified in terms of human actions,
specifically those contributing to desertification, agricultural
developments and deforestation and reforestation. To some extent, the
same methods are also able to predict alternative developmental pathways
into the future, given past and present trajectories of land-use
change. He is thus able to warn when projected changes indicate a
decrease in the ability of the natural environment to sustain human
activities into our uncertain future.
Starting with pictures of the earth from space, Eric
Lambin has shown us, using change-vector analysis, what the human
species is doing to planet earth. He is able to interpret, and most
importantly quantify, the changes that have been recorded by these
satellites and has shown how local changes in land cover and land use
are often brought about by global forces driven by political, social and
economic factors beyond the control of the local inhabitants. His
studies have covered local, regional and global perspectives. Eric
Lambin has been able to show us that there is no First World and no
Third World. There is only One World; we are all part of it and we
should look after it carefully.
Jury members :
Professor S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan
(Frank J.
Gould Professor in Science, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences,
New York University- USA).
Srinivasa Varadhan was educated in India, receiving his
Bachelor's degree in 1959 from Madras University and Ph.D in 1963 from
Indian Statistical Institute. He move to USA in 1963 and has stayed at
Courant Institute, New York University ever since. He has published
extensively on different aspects of probability theory. He has received
many awards for his work including the Abel Prize, in 2007. He has been
elected to National Academies of USA, India and UK.
Chairman
and
Professor Louis E. Brus
(Samuel Latham Mitchill Professor, Chemistry Dept., Columbia University
- USA)
Louis Brus was educated in Chemical Physics at Rice
University and Columbia University. In 1973 he joined the chemistry and
materials research area of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He
returned to Columbia in 1996, where he is now S. L. Mitchill Professor
of Chemistry. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and
in 1998 was the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Gordon
Conferences. He has won the APS Langmuir Prize, the ACS Chemistry of
Materials Prize, the OSA Wood Prize, and in 2008 the inaugural Kavli
Prize in Nanoscience.
Professor Stephen Y. Chou
(Joseph C. Elgin Professor, Dept. of Electrical
Engineering, Princeton University – USA).
Stephen Y. Chou, head of the NanoStructure Laboratory at
Princeton University, received his PhD from MIT (1986). Dr. Chou’s
pioneering research and inventions have shaped new paths in the fields
of nanofabrication, nanoscale electronics, optoelectronics, magnetics,
biotechnology and materials, and have brought significant impacts to
both academia and industry. As an entrepreneur, he founded Nanonex and
NanoOpto, and is a co-Founder of BioNanoMatrix. Among other awards and
honors, Dr. Chou is a member of National Academy of Engineering, a
recipient of IEEE Brunetti Award, IEEE Fellow, Packard Fellow, and an
Inductee of New Jersey High Technology Hall of Fame.
Dr. Chou’s graduate work used X-ray lithography to scale
MOSFETs to the 60 nm range (1982-86). Since 1985 he has demonstrated
various ultra-small MOSFETs, quantum devices, and single electron
transistors. In early 1990’s, he began pioneering work in exploring
sub-wavelength optical elements (SOEs) –a new class of optical devices
suited for miniaturization and wafer-scale integration, as well as in
bringing nanofabrication into magnetic data storage media, which led to
his invention of quantized magnetic disks (now termed bit-patterned
media) – a new paradigm in magnetic data storage. In 1994, he invented
one of his best-known works, nanoimprint lithography (NIL), a
revolutionary nanoscale patterning method that allows sub-10 nm
patterning over large areas with high throughput and low
cost. He and his group are the first
to apply NIL to a broad range of fields such as
electronics, optics, display, data storage, biotechnologies and
materials. Since 2000, Dr. Chou and his group have been pioneering
various innovative DNA sensors (i.e., nanochannels and nanogap
detectors) by combining the cutting edge nanofabrication,
nanoelectronics, and nanophotonics with biology. Dr. Chou is also the
primary inventor of lithographically induced self-assembly (LISA),
laser-assisted direct imprint (LADI), and self-perfection by
liquefaction (SPEL).
Professor Arthur Jaffe
(Landon T. Clay Professor, Dept. of Physics, Harvard University – USA).
Arthur Jaffe is the Landon T. Clay Professor of
Mathematics and Theoretical Science at Harvard University. He is a
member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish
Academy. He was a founder and then the first President of the Clay
Mathematics Institute, which established the Millennium Problems in
Mathematics. He received the Dannie Heinemann Prize of the American
Institute of Physics and the Prize in the Physical Science of the New
York Academy of Science, for his research that demonstrates the
mathematical compatibility of special relativity with quantum theory, in
space-time of less than four dimension.
Professor Thomas Kailath
(Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Stanford
University – USA).
Thomas Kailath (Sc.D.,MIT,1961) has
been at Stanford University since 1963, where he is now Hitachi America
Professor of Engineering, Emeritus. His research has ranged over several
fields, including information theory, linear systems, estimation and
control, signal processing, semiconductor manufacturing, probability and
statistics, and matrix and operator theory. Major honors include the
IEEE Medal of Honor, Guggenheim and Churchill Fellowships, several
honorary degrees, election to the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of
Fame and to the US National Academy of Engineering, the US National
Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is
also a foreign member of several academies, most recently of the Royal
Society. In 2009, he received a Padma Bhushan national award from the
President of India.
Professor
Sir Peter Knight, FRS
(Senior
Principal of the Faculty of Natural Science, Imperial College London -
UK).
Professor Sir Peter Knight is Senior Principal at
Imperial College London and Professor of Quantum Optics. He was knighted
in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2005 for his work in optical
physics. Peter Knight is a Past-President of the Optical Society of
America. He is a Thomson-ISI “Highly Cited Author.” His research centres
on theoretical quantum optics, strong field physics and especially on
quantum information science. He has won a number of prizes and awards
including the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute of Physics and the
Ives Medal of the OSA. He has been a Visiting Professor at the
University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Professor
Hans Mooij
(Kavli
Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology - The
Netherlands).
Hans Mooij is professor of nanoscience and university
professor at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. He was a
visiting professor at Stanford and MIT and was Loeb lecturer at Harvard
University. Mooij is the founding director of the Kavli Institute of
Nanoscience in Delft. His research is directed towards superconducting
nanosystems for quantum information processing. He is a member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and fellow of the American
Physical Society. Among others he received the Europhysics Condensed
Matter Prize and an honorary doctorate of Trondheim University.
Professor
Jerry A.
Nolen Jr.
(Argonne
Distinguished Fellow,
Argonne National Laboratory, Physics Division – USA).
Jerry Nolen, Physics Division, Argonne National
Laboratory. Dr. Nolen is currently an Argonne Distinguished Fellow with
a research program in the fields of accelerator physics, beam optics,
and development of new methods for the production of and research with
intense beams of radioactive isotopes. He was a Woodrow Wilson Graduate
Fellow in Physics at Princeton University, a Professor of Physics and
Associate Director of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory
at Michigan State University. He has served on many national and
international advisory and executive committees such as the U.S. NSF/DOE
Nuclear Science Advisory Committee and the GSI (Germany), GANIL
(France), and RIKEN (Japan) Technical Advisory Committees.
Professor David J. Rogers
(Professor of Ecology, Dept. of Zoology, TALA Research
Group, Oxford University – UK).
David J. Rogers, MA, D.Phil. (Oxon) -
Curator of the Hope Entomological Collections
-Founding
Fellow, Green College. First (Zoology) and second (Entomology)
degrees at Oxford UK followed by 2 years in Uganda studying tsetse
flies, then a lecturer-ship and later professor-ship at Oxford
University. David Rogers is interested in insect population ecology in
general and in the ecology and epidemiology of vector-borne diseases in
particular, especially the African trypanosomiases, dengue, yellow
fever, West Nile virus and bluetongue. He uses remotely sensed satellite
data in much of this work and is intrigued by the potential power of
Earth Observation data in both statistical and biological models of the
distribution and intensity of organisms and diseases.
Professor Henry I. Smith
(Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical
Engineering,Codirector, NanoStructures Laboratory, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology – USA).
Henry I.
Smith
Is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Co-Director of the
NanoStructures Lab at MIT. From 1990 to 2005 he held the Keithley Chair
in Electrical Engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a
Fellow of the Optical Society of America, and a member of the APS, AVS,
MRS and Sigma Xi. He is a recipient of the Cledo Brunetti Award of the
IEEE and the Baccus Award of SPIE. He holds over 30 US patents and has
published over 400 technical articles.
Professor
David N.
Reinhoudt
(Faculteit
Technische Natuurwetenschappen,
University of Twente,
Enschede – The Netherlands).
Professor David.N. Reinhoudt was born in 1942 in The
Netherlands, graduated in chemistry in 1969 from Delft. During 1970-1975
he worked at Shell. In 1975 he was appointed as a part-time professor at
the University of Twente and in 1978 as a full professor. Since 2002 he
is chairman of the board of the Dutch Network for Nanotechnology. He is
a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. He is the author of
more than 900 scientific publications.
Members
Professor Patrick De Wilde
(Director,
Institute for Advanced Study, Technische Universität Munchen - Germany).
Patrick Dewilde received the degree of Electrical
Engineering from the University of Leuven in 1966, the License in
Mathematics from the Belgian Central Examination Commission in 1968 and
the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in
1970. He has held research and teaching positions at the University of
California in Berkeley, the University of Lagos in Nigeria and the
University of Leuven. In 1977 he became full professor of Electrical
Engineering at the Technical University of Delft (the Netherlands). In
1981 he was named Fellow of the IEEE for his work on Scattering Theory.
From 1993 to 2001, he was the Scientific Director of the Delft Institute
of Microelectronics and Submicron Technology DIMES, and 2002 to 2007
Scientific Director of the 'ICT Delft Research Centre’ at Delft
University of Technology. Presently he is Director of the Institute for
Advanced Study of the Technische Universität München. He was elected a
regular member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Science in 1993. From 1996
to 2005 he was chairman of the Technology Foundation STW. In 2000 he
received an IEEE Circuits and System Society Golden Jubilee Medal, and
in 2003 a Humboldt Research Prize. He is the author of a large number of
scientific publications and two books. In 2005 he was elevated to the
Knighthood of the Dutch Lion by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
Consultant
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