Leadership

Bruce W. Fouke holds the Ralph E. Grim Endowed Professorship in Earth Science & Environmental Change at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has served as Director of the Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center since 2012. His research focuses on the survival of Life through geological time, which has depended on organisms successfully responding to, and eventually controlling, mineral growth within the environment. Biomineralization is an essential, unavoidable and ubiquitously distributed force of nature, providing fundamental benefits (bones and teeth) to profound practical problems and disease (kidney stones to heart and breast calcification). These studies of Life-Mineral-Water interaction are conducted in modern and ancient coral reefs (Curaçao, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, European Alps), hot springs (Yellowstone, Italy, Turkey), Earth’s deep subsurface (Illinois, Alaska, Scotland), Roman aqueducts (Italy), and the human body (Mayo Clinic, ULCA Health, Northwestern Medicine). Websites: Mayo Clinic Heritage Films: A World in a Grain of Sand: New Discoveries in Kidney Stones: http://history.mayoclinic.org/books-films/heritage-films.php NASA Art of Yellowstone Science (free PDF download of Art of Yellowstone Science) https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/the-art-of-yellowstone-science/ Fouke Research Group at Illinois: https://geology.illinois.edu/directory/profile/fouke