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 Interim Assistant Dean for Research in June 2019 after participating as the Research Dean’s representative in LEAD21, a year-long leadership program supporting the mission of land grant universities across the nation. He was promoted to Interim Associate Dean for Research in May 2020 and Associate Dean for Research in July 2021.

At UF, Dr. Adams has served in a number of governance roles at the department, college, and university level, including as a member of Faculty Senate (2017-2019), and is affiliate faculty of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Tropical Conservation and Development Program, and the UF Water Institute. He currently serves as 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 serves as an Editor-in-Chief at the journal Forests.

Dr. Adams has published 66 journal articles, 79 book chapters and other non-refereed publications, and multiple technical reports and conference presentations; and he has been an investigator on projects totaling $27 million from a variety of funding sources. Recently 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 he leads the modeling work for a $5 million USDA-funded project that is assessing the socioecological impacts of managing to meet new water resources standards in the region. 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).