Benjamin Z. Houlton is an environmental scientist and the Ronald. P. Lynch Dean of the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. [1] Previously he served as the director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at University of California, Davis [2]
His research interests include global ecosystem processes, [3] [4] climate change solutions, [5] and agricultural sustainability. [6] He was appointed dean in October 2020. His lab created a new benchmarking tool to calculate nitrogen's substantial impact on the global climate system used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [7] A 2018 paper found that 25% of the nitrogen available to plants comes from rock weathering. [8]