Joshua Tewksbury

Current Position

Colorado Hub Director of Future Earth, Research Professor at the University of Colorado, and Senior Scholar, at Colorado State University, Future Earth, University of Colorado, Colorado State University

Current Residence

Boulder, Colorado, United States

Professional Website

About Joshua's Work

I was trained in Landscape Ecology, conservation, and evolutionary biology. In my 20+ years of research experience, much of my work has been focused on climate impacts on plants and animals at large landscape scales, and the feedbacks of those systems on people; the influence of fragmentation, connectivity, invasive species and mutualism loss on populations and communities; and the evolution and functional significance of chemical defenses in plants. More recently, I have been working on issues relating to the structure of sustainability science.

Long before joining Future Earth as the Director of the Colorado Global Hub, I was a professor at the University of Washington. I started as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology in 2003. In 2007, I began working with the University of Washington leadership on the formation of a new College of the Environment. After a difficult 4 year process, the new college was successfully formed. At this point, I was made full professor, given the Maggie and Doug Walker Endowed Professorship in Natural History, and became the first faculty with a split appointment between the new College of the Environment and the Department of Biology, which remained in the College of Arts and Sciences.

In 2012, I went on an extended leave from the University of Washington to launch the Luc Hoffmann Institute, a global research center integrated within the International Secretariat of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Geneva Switzerland. I served as the founding director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute, and as the chief voice for science within WWF, for three years, and while there, I started the Luc Hoffmann Fellows programme and launched over dozen research projects, including work on the Food-Energy-Water nexus in Southeast Asia, assessments of development corridors in East Africa, global mapping of threats to biodiversity and the development of Regional (subnational)ly-appropriate low-carbon sustainability targets for urban areas. The work in WWF was an excellent springboard for my current role in Future Earth.