Profile of James R. Ehleringer

Abstract

For the past 40 years, ecologist James R. Ehleringer has led students and colleagues to California’s Death Valley to collect leaves from Encelia farinosa , a common desert shrub known as brittlebrush. The little shrub launched Ehleringer’s career, sending it in multiple directions and leading to major discoveries and unforeseen applications. He has used plant ecology as a window into the effects of climate change, illuminated differences between C3 and C4 photosynthesis, and used stable isotopes to examine ecosystems and unravel forensic mysteries. Ehleringer’s dynamic career is rooted at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and in far-flung collaborations. His Inaugural Article (1) grows out of his doctoral work, synthesizing four decades of brittlebrush observations to describe how climate change is affecting desert plants. Ehleringer, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Utah, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. James R. Ehleringer. Image credit: Dave Titensor (The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT). As stable as Ehleringer’s life has been since arriving in Utah in 1977, his childhood was the opposite. The oldest of five siblings, Ehleringer moved with his family every few years. His father was a member of the United States Navy stationed both in the Pacific and the Atlantic, often leaving for a year at a time, while his mother stayed with the children on Navy bases and homes as distant as Honolulu, Hawaii and Nice, France. As Ehleringer moved around, he developed a love of the ocean and dreamed of studying marine biology, a big leap for a kid with no scientific role models and who would be only the second person in his immediate family to go to college. In the summer of 1966, Ehleringer landed a high school research position at the Scripps …