Ian Billick, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) near Crested Butte, will discuss the history and future of field science within the context of exploration and discovery. He will quickly move through the age of exploration starting with the fall of Constantinople, through economy botany, to the emergence of modern science, and talk about how a confluence of sensing technology, deployment platforms, and big data is fundamentally changing the process of discovery.
Ian started his love affair with RMBL as a summer student in 1988. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-San Diego for field work done at RMBL, he worked as a research scientist at the University of Houston and was a visiting faculty member at Truman State University (Missouri). He’s been Executive Director of RMBL since 2000 and lives full-time in the Crested Butte area where he is raising two sons, Cormac and Giles, with his wife Jennie.
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