David Lopez-Carr

Biography

David López-Carr is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Human-Environment Dynamics Lab (HED) and serves as Associate Dean of the University of California Education Abroad Program (UCEAP). After receiving a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina in 2002, he was a NIH post-doctoral fellow in Biostatistics in the School of Public Health and Carolina Population Center. He has lived, worked, and traveled in over 70 countries worldwide and speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and rudimentary Q’eqchí Maya. Professor López-Carr uses mixed methods to examine potential win-win outcomes for people and the environment. He has authored over 230 scientific publications with a focus on links among population, health, rural livelihood vulnerability and resilience, agriculture, and marine and forest resource use and conservation through ongoing projects in California, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His scholarship has been supported by over 10 million USD from over 80 fellowships, grants, and awards from NASA, NOAA, NSF, NIH, the Mellon, two Fulbright Fellowships, and numerous other sources. With co-authors, he was awarded the 2024 Ecological Society of America's (ESA) Sustainability Science Award and the Frontiers Planet Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences. López-Carr was awarded the Research Excellence Award from the Population Specialty Group (2017) and the Human Dimensions of Global Change Specialty Group (2024) the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2013, in 2014 he was elected an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow ‘’for advancing our scientific understanding of the coupled process of human population dynamics and environmental change.’’ López-Carr has also received several teaching and mentoring awards, including the 2022 AAG Excellence in Mentoring Award and the 2024 Conference of Latin American Geography Teaching Award as well as several awards for service to the university and to the Geography profession.

Website: https://people.geog.ucsb.edu/~carr/

Research

Prof. López-Carr integrates mixed methods (including field-based surveys with remote sensing) to research dynamics among population (migration, fertility, mortality), health (infectious disease, nutrition, environmental exposures), livelihoods, and the environment with implications for equitable and sustainable development and conservation. Human impacts research includes deforestation in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala and global monitoring of land degradation in collaboration with the UNCCD. Human adaptation research includes migration, land use, conservation, dietary, health and livelihood responses and outcomes to climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, China, Latin America, and California’s Central Valley.