About IESP - Faculty & Staff
History | Mission | Faculty & Staff | Affiliated Environmental Faculty | Contact Us
David H. Wise, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Institue for Environmental Science and Policy
Professor, Biological Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago
845 West Taylor Street
3354 SES, MC 066
Phone: 312-413-9191
Email: dhwise@uic.edu
Education
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1974
M.S., University of Michigan, 1969
B.A., Swarthmore College, 1967
Previous Positions
2006 Fulbright Scholar, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
1993-2006 Professor of Entomology, University of Kentucky
1981-1993 Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC);
Affiliate Associate Professor of Zoology, University of Maryland College Park
1985-1986 Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, University of Göttingen, Germany
1976‑1981 Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, UMBC
1974‑1976 Assistant Professor of Biology, University of New Mexico
1970‑1971 Lecturer in Zoology, University of Michigan
1969‑1970 Instructor in Biology, Albion College
David Wise joined the University of Illinois at Chicago in November 2006 as Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and affiliated researcher in the Institute of Environmental Science and Policy. Prof. Wise’s research program investigates the causes and implications of food-web complexity and explores how human-induced impacts, such as global climate change and habitat modification, will affect the functioning of terrestrial food webs. Many controversies in ecology continue because we are largely ignorant of the functional consequences of biodiversity. For example: What is the relationship between species diversity and the number, complexity and strength of pathways of direct and indirect effects in food webs? How do species interactions in complex food webs affect ecosystem processes such as primary production and litter decomposition? Prof. Wise’s research group relies on field experimentation, behavioral experiments in the laboratory, multivariate analyses of field surveys, stable isotope analyses to investigate trophic structure and connections between sub-webs, immunological and molecular techniques to identify predator-prey interactions in the field, meta-analyses of published studies, and mathematical modeling. Additional information is available on his lab website. Dr. Wise is also a Co-Chair of the Chicago Wilderness Science Team.
Before joining the UIC community, Prof. Wise focused on arthropod-dominated food webs of the forest floor and on small-scale agroecosystems. He continues his basic research on the ecology of food webs, and also is expanding the scope of his program to include topics central to IESP’s interdisciplinary graduate training program in the ecology, management and restoration of integrated human/natural landscapes --- LEAP (“Landscape, Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes”; www.leap.uic.edu). In expanding his program, Prof. Wise and his students will be investigating food-web structure and functioning in the context of habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and ecological restoration in diverse Chicagoland landscapes, e.g. forests, prairie, wetlands and urban gardens.