James Elser is Director of the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance (SPA) at Arizona State University as well as Bierman Professor of Ecology and Director of the Flathead Lake Biological of the University of Montana. Trained as a limnologist, Dr. Elser is best known for his work in studying the impacts of limiting nutrients, such as phosphorus, in organisms and ecosystems. More recently, he led an NSF-funded research coordination network at Arizona State University to complete interdisciplinary studies to advance phosphorus sustainability to protect water quality while assuring long-term access to phosphorus for food production. Author / coauthor of more than 290 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Elser has also co-authored Phosphorus: Past and Future and co-edited Phosphorus, Food, and Our Future, both published by Oxford University Press. In recognition of his research achievements, Dr. Elser was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2008. In 2012 he was honored with the G.E. Hutchinson Award of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), the world’s largest scientific association dedicated to aquatic sciences, and in 2013 he was elected as a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Elser earned a BS degree at the University of Notre Dame, an MS degree at the University of Tennessee, and a PhD degree at the University of California (Davis).