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William Anderegg: He Speaks for the Trees
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY WILLIAM ANDEREGG IS A 2023 RECIPIENT OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION’S (NSF) WATERMAN AWARD.
The nation’s highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers, the award was presented to him and other recipients in May at a ceremony during the NSF meeting in Washington, DC. He is also one of three national laureates to receive this year’s Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists as well as acknowledged, with his mentor John Sperry, emeritus faculty member, by Clarivate as being one of the most cited scientists in the world.
As Director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy, Anderegg also oversaw the inaugural Wilkes Climate Summit (May 16-17) at the U. The summit offered scores of panelists and keynote speakers including Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson, former state legislator Tim Hawkes, recently installed as the College of Science’s first Senior Fellow, SBS’s own Fred Adler and Amy Luers, Global Director for Sustainability Science at Microsoft.
Presentations from the five finalists competing for the historic $1.5 million Wilkes Climate Prize were also staged for the gathering of more than 400. The winner, Seattle-based Lumen Bioscience, was announced in September at a special event hosted at the Natural History Museum of Utah. The winning entry proposes dosing all dairy cows and beef cattle with a methanogen-inhibiting, genetically engineered microbe called spirulina by 2040, which they estimate would reduce methane emissions from livestock by 40%. To achieve this, they estimate they will need 1,540,000 tons a year of spirulina, which requires a spirulina pond that is 14 x 14 miles in area in an area spread globally via local spirulina farms.
The Wilkes directorship is a natural role for Anderegg whose research is driven by concerns that drought, insects, and wildfire may devastate forests in the coming decades. “We study how drought and climate change affect forest ecosystems, including tree physiology, species interactions, carbon cycling and biosphere-atmosphere feedback,” writes the forest ecologist. “This research spans a broad array of spatial scales from xylem cells to ecosystems and seeks to gain a better mechanistic understanding of how climate change will affect forests around the world.”
