Background

Damian Adams is a natural resource economist tenured in the School of Forest, Fisheries & Geomatics Sciences with a joint appointment in the Food and Resource Economics Department at UF. He earned his Ph.D. (2007) in Food and Resource Economics and his J.D. (2001) from the University of Florida, and an M.Phil. (2004) in Land Economy from the University of Cambridge in England. He joined UF/IFAS Administration as Associate Dean for Research in 2021 after completing LEAD21, a year-long leadership program supporting the mission of land grant universities across the nation. As Associate Dean for Research, Dr. Adams leads on several UF/IFAS seed funding and training programs, and on major initiatives including artificial intelligence and emerging enterprises & entrepreneurship.

At UF, Dr. Adams has served in a number of governance roles at the department, college, and university levels, including as a member of Faculty Senate (2017-2019), and as affiliate faculty of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Tropical Conservation and Development Program, and the UF Water Institute. He served as founding Director of a region-wide initiative called ProForest (Proactive Forest Health & Resilience), which unites experts in the area of forest management and policy to sustain forest systems and their benefits to society. He also currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief at the journal Forests.

Dr. Adams has published 90 journal articles, 81 book chapters and other non-refereed publications, and multiple technical reports and conference presentations; and he has been an investigator on projects totaling more than $32 million from a variety of funding sources. He led the economics and policy work for a $20 million USDA-funded project examining climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies for southern forests, and the modeling work for a $5 million USDA-funded project that assessed the socioecological impacts of managing to meet new water resources standards in the region. He also led a USDA-funded, multi-year project in Cuba – the first field research project funded by the USDA since the Kennedy Administration – that assessed the economic and ecological (forest health) implications of removing the US-Cuba trade embargo. His recognitions and awards for research include the USDA-NIFA Partnership Award for Mission Integration (2016), UF Research Foundation Professor (2018-2020), UF Term Professor (2017-2019), and Everglades Foundation Research Fellow (2019).