Tyler Volk
American professor of environmental studies and biology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tyler Volk is a Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Biology at New York University (NYU). His areas of interest include environmental challenges to global prosperity, global changes in CO2, biosphere theory, and the role of life in Earth's dynamics.[1] He first attended the University of Michigan, graduating with a Bachelors in Architecture in 1971; he later graduated from NYU with a Masters in Applied Sciences in 1982 and a PhD in Applied Sciences in 1984.[2]
Tyler Volk | |
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| Born | United States |
| Education | University of Michigan (BA) New York University (MA, PhD) |
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| Doctoral advisor | Martin Hoffert |
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Environmental studies and teaching
Volk worked on the planning and development of the Environmental Studies Program with Dale Jamieson, Christopher Schlottmann, and others, launching it in 2007; this program became a department in NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Science in the autumn of 2014.[1] Volk was awarded NYU’s “Golden Dozen” teaching award for academic years 2003–2004 [3] and 2007–2008.[4] In academic year 2008–2009, Volk received an all-university Distinguished Teaching Award.[5]
Biosphere science
Volk's research involves studying Earth's biosphere, particularly modeling the global carbon cycle, quantifying the biological, physical, and chemical impacts from the ocean and biosphere on it.[6]
In 2000, Volk served on the American Geophysical Union's Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis program committee in Valencia, Spain; his presentation, “Gaia is life in a wasteworld of by-products”, was published in 2004.[7] Clarifying a distinctive version of the Gaia-biosphere, Volk introduced the concepts of “biochemical guilds", life and chemical by-products, and “cycling ratios”.[8] He debated terms such as “regulation” in biospheres, and the issues about the structure of “Gaia” with James Lovelock, Tim Lenton, and David Wilkinson.[9] Volk also publicly debated Axel Kleidon on the role of entropy, or randomness, in the biosphere.[10]
NASA advanced life support
Volk built math models for the cycling of elements in "closed ecological life support systems" (CELSS) at NASA [11]; he remained active in the subfield of advanced life support from 1986 to 1998. He and colleague John Rummel developed early computer models that connected the flows and chemical transformations of crop production, human metabolism, and waste processing in such systems.[12] Volk later began focusing on crop growth and development for enhanced productivity, collaborating with experimentalists at Utah State University and NASA, in particular publishing with crop physiologists Bruce Bugbee of Utah State University, Raymond Wheeler of the NASA Kennedy Space Center,[13] and Ph.D. students Francesco Tubiello and James Cavazonni at NYU.[14]
Books
Tyler Volk has authored seven books, including CO2 Rising: The World’s Greatest Environmental Challenge,[15] What is Death?: A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life,[16] Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth,[17] and Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind.[18]
In 2017, he published Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be,[19] which explores the rhythms of what Tyler Volk calls the "grand sequence", a series of levels of sizes and innovations that build from elementary quanta to globalized human civilization. The book was reviewed in Science in January 2018.[20]