Congratulations to Crow Canyon board member Tim Kohler for his election to the National Academy of Sciences!

First established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences is a nonprofit society of scholars tasked with providing independent, objective advice about science and technology to the nation. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community. New members are elected “in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research,” according to the NAS website. Kohler is one of just 150 new members announced last month.

Kohler studies the social dynamics of prehistoric cultures, specializing in the U.S. Southwest. His research explores the relationships between demography, violence, wealth inequality, social evolution, and climate variability. He is a Regents Professor at Washington State University; an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute; and a Research Associate at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. He also served as the Johanna-Mestorf Chair at Christian-Albrechts Universität, Kiel Germany and as an Invited Scholar at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan.

Tim’s research on southwestern U.S. archaeology began when he joined the Dolores Archaeological Program in 1979, and he went on to direct an excavation project in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico.

His recent research includes SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), a collaboration with Arizona State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Crow Canyon that makes data on past environments widely accessible. In addition, he recently worked with colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute on an NSF IBSS-funded project to analyze information flows in human organizations. With Amy Bogaard, University of Oxford, he directs the Global Dynamics of Inequality Project (GINI), which is run through the Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Kohler recently served as a lead author of one of the chapters in the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dealing with how humans are adapting, and might adapt, to the changes in the world’s weather systems that we are already beginning to experience.

Congratulations on this exciting achievement, Tim!