Christopher Field

Biography

Field was born in California in 1953. He grew up in California, Arizona and Wyoming, with his family moving around during his childhood in order to find the best locations for his father's sawmill. He describes most of his childhood memories as being associated with the wilderness. During junior high school, Field was inspired by "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau; he had a copy of the book that he would frequently annotate. He was a National Merit Scholar in high school.

In 1975, Field graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in biology. He then went to Stanford University, where he received a PhD in biological sciences in 1981. His dissertation Carbon gain consequences of leaf aging in a California shrub focused on how a leaf interacts with the rest of the plant's functions as a whole, as well as how to use data from leaves to measure photosynthesis in the surrounding environment. Field said he chose his thesis because of his curiosity for "how large parts of the Earth system are built from small pieces." He later credited this research on different biological scales as what led him to the carbon cycle and his work surrounding climate change.

As my work on scaling progressed, it ran quickly into the conclusion that the Earth is changing. Not only through big changes in climate, but also big changes in land use and the composition of the atmosphere, with more and more effects on plants and animals.

— Christopher Field

From 1981 to 1984, Field was an associate professor of biology at the University of Utah. He became a staff scientist for the Carnegie Institution for Science in 1984 and in 1986 started working as an assistant professor at Stanford.

In 2002, Field founded Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology. This was the first new department to be established at the Carnegie Institute in 70 years.

In 2005, Field became faculty director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Reserve, a nature preserve run by Stanford. He worked to integrate Jasper Ridge with the main Stanford campus as director. While there, Field published 78 articles about his research at Jasper Ridge, more than any other individual.

He was one of the inaugural Fellows of the Ecological Society of America, elected in 2012.

Field was the 2014 recipient of the Roger Revelle Medal of the American Geophysical Union.

Since 2016, Field has served as director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. His research "focuses on climate change, especially solutions that improve lives now, decrease the amount of future warming, and support vibrant economies." Field's recent work has been centered around coastal flooding and wildfires, the latter being something California has seen an increase in over recent years.