Meet Jack Liu
Dr. Jianguo “Jack” Liu is a human-environment scientist and a sustainability scholar. He also holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability, is the director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, and is University Distinguished Professor of fisheries and wildlife, at Michigan State. Dr. Liu has been a member of ESA since 1989, and was elected as a Fellow in 2018 with ESA. This year, he was is the recipient of the Innovations in Sustainability Science Award from ESA.
The paper written by Dr. Liu and his colleagues, “Nexus approaches to global sustainable development” (Liu, J., et al. 2018), builds on and expands nexus approaches addressing complex interactions among the food, energy, and water sectors under the integrated framework of metacoupling (human-nature interactions within as well as between adjacent and distant systems). Jack and his colleagues explain how the integration between ecology and other biophysical sciences, social sciences, and engineering can have a more comprehensive understanding and sustainable management of multiple connecting sectors and challenges. The work they do could impact biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, energy security, poverty alleviation, and provisioning of food and water. It also suggests useful paths toward better planning, decision-making, governance, and resource management locally, nearby, and faraway.
Dr. Liu has been a part of many national and international committees and panels. He is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and is a lead author of the global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services organized by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity. He is the founder of the International Network of Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems and is the past president of the U.S. Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology. As a member of ESA, he has served on the Public Affairs Committee and been a part of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter, International Affairs Section, Asian Ecology Section and Applied Ecology Section.