Professor Oliver Chadwick, considered one of the world’s leading scientists in relating soils to ecology and Earth system science, was recently selected as a Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA). The award is the highest honor the Society bestows on its members. Oliver is one of 14 individuals selected as a Fellow in 2006 (a maximum of 0.3% of SSSA’s membership base of 6,000 are elected to Fellow each year). The prestigious award was presented at the SSSA Annual Meeting held in conjunction with the American Society of Agronomy and Crop Science Society of America on Nov. 12-16 in Indianapolis, IN.
The SSSA is part of The International Soil Science Society (ISSS) which was established in 1924 as a private, non-profit organization to foster all branches of soil science and their applications. In 1993, the ISSS was approved as a Scientific Member Union of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and began its transformation to an international scientific union. Since 1998, membership in the new International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) requires national membership through an adhering body. In the United States, this is the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. adhering body for ICSU and most of its 26 disciplinary member unions. The U.S. National Committee for Soil Science (USNC/SS), upon which Dr. Chadwick serves, represents the interests of the U.S. soil science community in the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS), a scientific union member of the International Council for Science (ICSU). For more, see .
Dr. Chadwick became the Chair of the Department of Geography in July 2006, and he is a joint professor in the Geography Department and the Environmental Studies Program at UCSB. His specialization in the Department of Geography is in soil sciences, including soil formation and advanced classification and evolution of soil landscapes. He received his BS degree in Biology from George Washington University, his MS degree in Horticulture from Cornell University, and his PhD in Soil Science and Quaternary Geology from the University of Arizona. Prior to moving to UCSB, he spent 8 years as a NASA research scientist at JPL-Caltech. Dr. Chadwick’s current research covers the following areas: organic and mineral fluxes in soils and ecosystems; soil-vegetation-landscape relationships; evolution of landscapes over Quaternary time scales; isotopic fractionations during weathering and soil development; soil response to change in environmental factors; and modeling variation in soil properties in space and time.
