U.S. Department of Energy names Michigan Tech Regional Center for Climate Change Research

Michigan Tech has been chosen by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to help spearhead a multi-million-dollar, national research program on global climate change and its effects on ecosystems and the atmosphere.

Professor Kurt Pregitzer, a leading researcher on the effects of climate change in forests, is director of the Midwestern Reginal Center, DOE Institute for Climatic Change Research.

Over the next five years, the Department of Energy's Office of Science plans to allocate over $38 million to be distributed by four Regional Centers of the National Institute for Climatic Change Research (NICCR). In addition to the Midwest Regional Center at Michigan Tech, centers will be located at Pennsylvania State University, Duke University, and Northern Arizona University.

Kurt Pregitzer, a professor of forest resources and environmental science, will head the Michigan Tech center. Pregitzer, director of Michigan Tech's Center for Ecosystem Science, has led numerous research studies on the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems.

"The center will competitively fund the best research that investigators from around the region propose," Pregitzer said. "We are all very excited about the role that the DOE is playing in advancing our understanding of climate change and its impacts on ecosystems."

The Michigan Tech center will select and coordinate NICCR-sponsored research studies in a thirteen-state area.

DOE program officer Jeff Amthor said that Michigan Tech was chosen primarily because of Pregitzer's ideas on how the NICCR could add to America's knowledge of global climate change.

"It was the compelling vision for how Tech can add value to the DOE Climate Change Research Program that pushed Tech over the top in the competition for the Midwestern Regional Center," he said.

"The slate is now blank on what we want to accomplish," Amthor added. "But we will dedicate some of our resources to the bigger, tougher, open-ended questions in climate change, so that when we look back in five years, we can say, 'We're glad we did that.'"

For more information, visit www.niccr.mtu.edu.

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