about
our people
Stephen Carpenter
Director of the Center for Limnology
Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Zoology
research areas: Scenarios, Water Quality
Carpenter is a leader of whole-ecosystem experiments and adaptive ecosystem management focused on freshwaters. His research topics include trophic cascades and their effects on production and nutrient cycling, contaminant cycles, freshwater fisheries, eutrophication, nonpoint pollution, ecological economics of freshwater, and resilience of ecosystems and social-ecological systems.
Carpenter is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Carpenter is the 2011 laureate of the Stockholm Water Prize. Other notable awards include a Pew Fellowship in Conservation and Environment, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Medal of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America, the Excellence in Ecology Prize from the Ecology Institute, and the Naumann-Thienemann medal of the International Society for Limnology.
Carpenter is Chair of the Science Committee for the Program on Ecosystem Change and Society of the International Council of Science. He is co-Editor in Chief of the journal Ecosystems and a member of governing boards for the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies. Carpenter is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America and founding member and Fellow of the Resilience Alliance. From 2000-2005 he served as co-chair of the Scenarios Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He led the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research program at U.W.-Madison from 1999-2009. He is a former President of the Ecological Society of America. Carpenter has published five books and more than 300 scientific papers, book chapters, reviewed reports and commentaries.
Carpenter received a B.A. from Amherst College (1974), M.S. from University of Wisconsin-Madison (1976), and Ph.D. from U.W. Madison (1979). From 1979-1989 he served as Assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1989.
