B.S. Forestry 1954

Daniel P. Loucks completed a B.S. in Forestry at Penn State in 1954; and earned an M.F. from Yale University in1955 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in1965. From 1965 to 2012, he served on the faculty of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University where he taught and directed research in the development and application of economics, ecology and systems analysis methods to the solution of environmental and regional water resources problems.

As professor emeritus Loucks has been teaching and advising at Cornell’s School of Public Policy on the development and application of systems analysis methods for analyzing public sector issues and problems. He served as Chair of his Department from 1974 to 1980, and as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering from 1980 to 1981.

During periods of leave from Cornell, Loucks has been a Research Fellow at Harvard University (1968); an Economist at the Development Research Center of the World Bank (1972-73); a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (1981-1982); and a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977-78), the University of Colorado in Boulder (1992), the University of Adelaide in South Australia (1992), the Aachen University of Technology in Germany (1993 and 1995), the University of Texas in Austin (2000), the Technical University of Vienna, Austria (2010-13), and the Technical University of Delft (1995) and the International Institute for Water Education (IHE-Delft) during short periods each year (1976 to 2018) in the Netherlands.

Since 1969 he has served as a consultant to private and government agencies and various organizations of the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO involved in regional water resources development planning in Asia, Australia, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. From 1975 to 1978 he was a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency participating in the US-USSR exchange program on environmental protection.

Loucks has served on various committees and boards of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and was appointed to US Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Advisory Board in 1994. He served as its Chair from 1996 to 1998 and received the Commander's Award for Public Service in 1998. He was given the first Maass/White Fellowship at the Corps’ Institute for Water Resources in Alexandria Va., in 2002. He currently serves on the Governing Board of the Natural Heritage Institute, a law firm specializing in freshwater restoration located in San Francisco, California. Its primary focus over the past decade has been on maintaining the biodiversity of the lower Mekong River in southeast Asia. 

To survive in an academic world, one must publish. Loucks claims he is particularly proud of his first publication. It was on Sustained Yield Management and published in the Journal of Forestry in 1964. The U.S. Forest Service labeled the article ‘For Official Use.’ It was Maurice K. Goddard who motivated Loucks to think about the watershed aspect of forest management, and from that beginning at Penn State, trees and water have been part of Loucks’ life.     

(adapted from https://www.iasted.org/conferences/speaker1-650.html with input from Dr. Loucks)

                                                                                                                                                                             April 2023

Department of Ecosystem Science and Management

Address

117 Forest Resources Building
University Park, PA 16802
Directions

Department of Ecosystem Science and Management

Address

117 Forest Resources Building
University Park, PA 16802
Directions