Jeffrey White is Professor of Environmental Science in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at I.U. Bloomington. He has served on the I.U. faculty for 34 years.
Dr. White is founding director of I.U.'s Integrated Program in the Environment, a campuswide program that combines education and research in environmental sciences and sustainability studies, gathering more than 100 faculty members, 25 departments and five schools into a single organization.
He's also been an associate dean and a department chair, but none of those administrative duties have ever been able to keep Jeffrey White of the field for long. Dr. White's extensive research focuses on understanding the effects of human activity on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
Since 1990, he's studied the cycling and emissions of greenhouse gases in northern landscapes. He's studied thawing permafrost in the remote Alaskan Arctic, and has spent the past decade heading up a NASA-funded project investigating the lakes, wetlands, and soils at the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
His research has yielded some sobering data about global climate change. Arctic environments are warming at unprecedented rates, twice as fast as other regions of the world. Jeffrey White has seen the effects of that warming up close and personal.
