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Giulio De Leo

Professor of Oceans, of Earth System Science, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy of Biology
I am a theoretical ecologist by training and vocation, and I investigate factors and processes driving the dynamics of natural and harvested populations and in understanding how to use this knowledge to inform practical management.

In recent years, since I moved to Stanford, I have focused my research effort on the resilience of natural or managed ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic stressors, environmental shocks, and climate change. I study resilience from two opposite view points: on the one hand, I study populations that prove to be resilient despite our effort to control or eradicate them, namely parasitic and infectious diseases. On the other hand, I have been working extensively to understand how to increase resilience of (mostly marine) population of commercial or conservation interest to extensive harvesting, environmental shocks, climate change and land use change.

I have been working on a number of theoretical and applied problems ranging from the conservation of the European eel to the sustainable management of the abalone fishery in Baja California in the face of climate change, the biocontrol of schistosomiasis in Western Africa and the relationship between resource exploitation, infectious diseases and poverty traps.

Ten years ago, I launched with Dr. Susanne Sokolow Galin the Stanford Program for Disease Ecology Health and the Environment and last year, I cofounded and co-chair, with Dr. Erin Mordecai (Biology, H&S), the Stanford {/I} Disease Ecology in a Changing World {/I} initiative in the Stanford Doerr School of sustainability and I am a founding member of the Stanford Human and Planetary Health Center. Our ultimate goal is to discover novel ecological solutions that can improve human wellbeing and the health of the environment that underpins it.

Education

Ph.D., University of Parma & University of Ferrara, Ecology (1993)
B.E. & M.Sc., Politecnico di Milano, Civil and Environmental Engineering (1989)

Publications