Glen MacDonald elected to the Royal Society of Canada

For a Canadian, this is kind of a big deal. Congratulations, félicitations, & meala-naidheachd, Glen!

Glen is a distinguished professor in the departments of geography and ecology & evolutionary biology (EEB) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the John Muir Memorial Chair in Geography. He has done a lot of work reconstructing Holocene (last 12 thousand years) paleoclimate from pollen entrained in lake sediments, tree rings, and other proxies in Canada, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. Glen has published on prehistoric sea level rise, the connection between the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the decline of the Harappan civilization in South Asia, and what is still (as far as I’m aware) the longest pre-instrumental record of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) from tree rings. He has also worked on paleohydrology and the “megadrought” concept, as well as temperature change around the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. 900-1300 CE) and Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1300-1850 CE), in the US Southwest. It was in the latter context, and an abortive attempt to reconstruct paleohydrologic regime change in neolithic Egypt, that we met, when he became my PhD supervisor. Glen has supervised dozens of PhDs, many of which have gone on to great things in academia and elsewhere.