Benjamin Z. Houlton is an environmental scientist and the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. [1] Previously he served as the director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment at University of California, Davis. [2] In 2025, Houlton was considered for the presidency of Iowa State University. [3] [4]
His research interests include global ecosystem processes, [5] [6] climate change solutions, [7] and agricultural sustainability. [8] He was appointed dean in October 2020. His lab created a new benchmarking tool to calculate nitrogen's substantial impact on the global climate system used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [9] A 2018 paper found that 25% of the nitrogen available to plants comes from rock weathering. [10]