“Science could not be better represented” – CC&E's Ed Laws becomes AAAS Fellow

BATON ROUGE - Recipients of the prestigious AAAS Fellowship are honored for advancing scientific research or its applications in service to society. In the case of Ed Laws, a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences who recently received the award, it was all of the above.

Chris D’Elia, Laws’ nominator and former dean of CC&E, said the contributions Laws has made throughout his career more than warrant the recognition, which is awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. D'Elia is currently faculty in the Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences.

“I nominated Ed Laws because without question, his career-long contributions to science merit the recognition that being named an AAAS Fellow provides,” D’Elia said. “His research and scholarship are clearly outstanding, but beyond that, his devotion to students and teaching is truly exceptional. Science could not be better represented.”

The fellowship serves as an acknowledgement of a career defined by a passion for the dual pursuits of academia: inquiry and education.

Laws’ main areas of research include phytoplankton ecology, environmental chemistry, and aquatic pollution – although a look at his publication and collaborations suggest an even wider-ranging set of interests. “As opportunities pop up,” Laws said, “I try one thing and another.”

In addition to publishing over 240 scientific manuscripts and having over 15,000 citations, Laws has authored two textbooks – the seminal environmental textbook Aquatic Pollution and another on mathematics for oceanographers. Although he does not count himself as a wetlands expert, he has worked extensively with researchers from China on wetlands issues there. Currently, he is working on treatment of nuclear wastewater using algae.

Laws’ work in education is no less varied – throughout his career, Laws has headed up large-section environmental science lectures for undergraduates, mentored graduate students, and taught prison inmates, both in Hawaii and at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

The creation Aquatic Pollution, now in its fourth edition, exemplifies Laws’ pragmatic approach. Early in his career, Laws taught a class in aquatic pollution, but couldn’t find a textbook he and his students liked enough to use. “We tried a couple, and the students didn’t like them, and I didn’t like them. So I started making handouts,” he recalled. After a while, he realized he had enough material to write his own textbook.

From the outset, Laws’ career has been defined by a desire to do relevant, helpful things. He began as a chemical physicist, obtaining a PhD from Harvard during the era of the Vietnam War. Political conditions of the time affected him. “I was doing these theoretical calculations, the distribution of electrons and molecules. I couldn’t see that it was relevant to some of the important issues of the day.”

In search of a new discipline, he got a job in the oceanography department at Florida State University, where he began working with phytoplankton while investigating the environmental impacts of highway construction on a local lake. This led to a position at the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii, where he worked for thirty years, before coming to LSU.  

The field of environmental sciences has changed a lot over the course of Laws’ career. “Climate change wasn’t even mentioned when I first started teaching,” he said. He remembers when some NSF research-funded temperature model of the ocean made him realize the realities of climate change. “When I started doing the model, I realized that I had to include temperature, because obviously, the temperatures are not the same everywhere in the ocean. And when I finally published the results in 2000, the title of the paper was Temperature Effects on Export Production. [W]hen I went back and looked at the proposal I’d written to NSF, I never mentioned temperature… [but] when it finally came out, it had very important implications for climate change.”

Laws noted the award was especially meaningful because he was nominated by his colleagues. “If you ask me what the award means to me, I would say that what is important to me about the award is that Chris D’Elia nominated me. It was Chris’ idea to nominate me, and that means a lot. I could not ask for a better colleague. Henry Williams at Florida A&M handled the nomination when it arrived at the AAAS. Henry and I have collaborated on scientific research for several years, since I came to LSU.”