Dr. James S. Coleman, 39, has been named vice president for research and business development of the Desert Research Institute. The approval of Coleman's new position by the Board of Regents of the University and Community College System of Nevada shifts Coleman's focus to the strategic development of research opportunities and capabilities for DRI. Coleman is a plant physiological ecologist who previously served as executive director of DRI's Biological Sciences Center and served as vice president in an acting capacity. Coleman was named an outstanding administrator for the university system in 1998 and has served as director of the system-wide EPSCoR program, a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to increase the scientific capabilities of states that have been underfunded in federal research dollars.
DRI President Stephen G. Wells said Coleman has an impressive record of research concerning the response of plants to environmental stress and damage. Coleman's work on the impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on plants was cited in the respected British journal The Scientist, in a 1996 ranking of the ten most significant papers on global climate change research since 1993. Coleman has just concluded a prestigious five-year "Young Investigator Award" from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has written more than 60 scientific publications.
Since Coleman arrived in Nevada three years ago, he has been principal or co-principal investigator on competitive grants totaling more than $9,000,000. He is also one of the principal investigators for Nevada's internationally recognized FACE (Free-Air CO2 Enrichment) experiment at the Nevada Test Site, which examines how deserts respond to global change.
Coleman is currently president of the Physiological Ecology Section of the 7,600-member Ecological Society of America (ESA). The section is among the largest sub-sections of the ESA and has an international membership.
Coleman earned his doctoral degree in ecology from Yale in 1987 and conducted post-doctoral research at Stanford and Harvard universities before joining the faculty of Syracuse University in 1990. At Syracuse, he received the Wasserstrom Prize recognizing outstanding graduate instruction. He served as a program officer at the NSF during 1995-96 and was responsible for administering programs in ecological and evolutionary physiology and terrestrial ecology and global change.
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