Evan H. DeLucia

Professor, Department of Plant Biology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Education
• Professional Experience
• Teaching
• Research Support
• Professional Societies
• Editorial Activities
• Honors and Awards

Evan H. DeLucia is the G. William Arends Professor of Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he was the founding Director of the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, served as Head of the Department of Plant Biology, and currently he is the director of the School of Integrative Biology.

After completing his B.A. at Bennington College and teaching at Phillips Andover Academy, DeLucia completed a M.F.S. (1982) in forest ecology at Yale University and a Ph.D. (1986) in plant ecology and physiology at Duke University. He joined the faculty at Illinois in 1986.  Among his awards, DeLucia was recognized as a University Scholar at the University of Illinois, a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University, a Fulbright Fellow at Landcare Research and an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005. 

DeLucia is a member of the American Association of Plant Physiologists, the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the Ecological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected Chair of the Physiological Ecology Section of the Ecological Society (1996-98). He currently serves on the editorial boards of Oecologia and Global Change Biology - Bioenergy.

The responses of forest and agro-ecosystems to elevated carbon dioxide and other elements of global change are at the center of DeLucia’s research.  Using ecological, physiological and genomic approaches, DeLucia seeks to understand how global change affects the carbon cycle and the trophic dynamics between plants and insects.  Recently, his research has expanded to consider the ecological consequences of deploying biofuel crops on the landscape. He has served in an advisory capacity to members of the US congress and the National Academy of Sciences.