The dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University is one of the two finalists to replace Iowa State University President Wendy Wintersteen, who is retiring.
Benjamin Houlton is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology as well as global development at Cornell. Houlton co-founded a company that works with landowners to remove carbon dioxide from the soil and he directs a 100-acre project on carbon sequestration. This is how he introduced himself as Cornell’s Dean of Agriculture in a video message.
“For the past 15 years, I have built a program focused on global environmental sustainability and most recently been thinking about how we can deploy carbon capture in working lands — that is farmlands and ranching land — to catalyze negative emissions and help produce food in a way that is more resistant to climate change as well as more nutritious.”
Houlton was born and raised in Wisconsin and earned a degree in water chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, a masters in environmental engineering science from Syracuse and a doctorate from Princeton in ecology and evolutionary biology. He previously served on the faculty at the University of California – Davis before his appointment at Cornell in 2020. Iowa State, Cornell, UC-Davis and Wisconsin-Stevens Point are all land-grant universities.
Houlton will visit the ISU campus tomorrow and participate in public forum late Wednesday afternoon. The hour-long forum will be livestreamed on the Board of Regents website.
The name of the other finalist for ISU’s presidency will be released tomorrow morning — and that person is scheduled to be on the Ames campus Thursday.