Simon Lewis

Simon L. Lewis is Professor of Global Change Science at the University of Leeds and University College London. A plant ecologist by training (Ph.D. Cambridge University) and one of the world’s most highly cited scientists, he focuses on changes to the Earth system with a central focus on the tropics. Dr. Lewis founded and co-manages the African Tropical Rainforest Observatory (www.afritron.org), a network of long-term tropical forest inventory sites across 13 countries in Africa, and co-manages the pan-tropical forest inventory data repository and data management tool, www.forestplots.net. In 2017, Dr. Lewis led the team that discovered the world's largest tropical peatland complex in the heart of the Congo basin. He recently published a twin human and Earth history, with Mark Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Yale University Press).