Peter Edwards

Prof. em. Peter Edwards holds a degree in botany from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. In 1973 he obtained his Ph.D. degree, also from Cambridge, for a thesis entitled Nutrient cycling in a New Guinea montane forest. He was lecturer/senior lecturer in ecology at the University of Southampton from 1973-1993, where he was also a director of the GeoData Institute, an environmental consultancy. He was professor of plant ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) from 1993 until 2013, and served as dean of Environmental Systems Science. As director of the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability from 2013 to 2017 he was responsible for several major research programmes related to cities, including ‘Future Cities Lab’ and ‘Cooling Singapore’.  

He is author of around 350 refereed scientific papers and author/editor of several books covering a wide range of environmental fields including ecosystem processes, insect–plant interactions, environmental management and biodiversity. His recent research has focused particularly on large-scale processes in terrestrial ecosystems, including interactions between large herbivores and vegetation, the dynamics of vegetation on the flood plains of large rivers, biological invasions, the role of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, and urban ecology.