Eric Post Awarded a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life and Health Sciences
Eric Post, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the 2012 Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life and Health Sciences. Established in 1980, the award recognizes scholarly or creative excellence represented by a single contribution or a series of contributions around a coherent theme. A committee of faculty peers reviews nominations and selects candidates.
Post is an internationally recognized leader in the study of ecological responses to climate change, and he specializes in integrating the study of such responses across levels of biological organization and across scales of space and time. He pioneered the development of time-series models of ecological dynamics incorporating large-scale climate indices to address the question of how global-scale climate change influences local populations. His work also is recognized for the novelty and creativity with which it merges analytical modeling, natural-history-based field observation, and large-scale field experimentation. Post's research has led to groundbreaking insights into how biotic interactions influence ecological responses to climate change, from individual organisms to ecosystems. Post's research, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society's Committee on Research and Exploration, is conducted almost exclusively in the Arctic, especially in Greenland, where he has worked since 1993.
Post's previous awards include an Edward D. Bellis Award, which he earned in 2010 for his outstanding contributions and dedication to graduate education and training at Penn State. He was named an honorary professor by Aarhus University in Denmark in 2009. In addition, Essential Science Indicators named Post as one of the top-ten most-cited researchers in the field of global warming.
Post has published numerous scientific papers in such journals as Science, Nature, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. He has served as a guest editor for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as an associate editor for Population Ecology and for Ecography, and as a guest editor for the journals Ecology and Northeastern Naturalist. He is the author of the academic book, Ecology of Climate Change, which will be published by Princeton University Press, and a co-author of Conserving Wildlife in a Changing Climate, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press. He was appointed a member of the Faculty of 1000 in 2011.
Post has served on many professional committees and panels, including the advisory committee to the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, the National Science Foundation's Global Change Biology Panel, and the National Science Foundation's Arctic Natural Sciences Panel.
Before joining the Penn State faculty in 2000, Post was a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oslo in Norway. In 1995, Post earned a doctoral degree in biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In 1989, he earned a bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, at the University of Minnesota.