Dr. Louchouarn joined The Ohio State University on August 1, 2022, as the senior vice provost for faculty. In this position, he leads the inaugural Office of Faculty Affairs (OFA) at Ohio State. He and the OFA team are developing and expanding programming to support faculty experience and success, such as professional development, career advancement, support to faculty and units in hiring, promotion, mid-term reviews, and leadership development. He is also a professor at the School of Earth Sciences.
"I am excited to help create an environment where every faculty member is seen in their whole identity, inundated with positive experiences throughout all stages of their career, and as such have a sense of belonging to their academic communities."
Dr. Louchouarn brings 15 years of incremental leadership responsibilities across multiple institutions, beginning his leadership journey as associate director of the MPA in Environmental Science and Policy at Columbia University, where he brought his multidisciplinary expertise to develop integrated learning across natural and social science methodologies and curricula. Before his move to Ohio State, Dr. Louchouarn was a regents professor at Texas A&M University with joint appointments in the Departments of Geography, Oceanography, and Marine and Coastal Environmental Sciences. He then served as department head for three years on the Galveston campus of Texas A&M University before being appointed its chief academic officer while simultaneously serving as associate provost on Texas A&M's main campus. After nine years in this dual position, he was appointed Texas A&M's interim vice provost for Faculty Affairs and Interdisciplinary Initiatives and served simultaneously as its Dean of Faculties.
His multidisciplinary research focuses on understanding the impacts of environmental perturbations on biogeochemical cycling at ecosystem interfaces and addressing capacity building in earth and environmental education in diverse communities. The orientation of his research in biogeochemistry deals with:
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the identification of fire markers and combustion byproducts in complex environmental mixtures and their application to reconstructions of fire/combustion history, and
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natural and human-induced fluctuations in material fluxes within watersheds.
In parallel, to address issues of learning and thinking in the environmental sciences, Dr. Louchouarn incorporates this research into inquiry-based educational models that question how people learn and make decisions on environmental issues.
French-born, he grew up and completed his elementary and secondary education in Mexico City. He then moved to Canada, where he completed a bachelor of science in marine biology in 1989 at McGill University (Montreal), followed by a master of science in 1992 and a PhD in 1997 at the University of Quebec in Montreal in Environmental Sciences (geochemistry). From 1998-1999, he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Texas-Marine Science Institute, where he worked on dissolved organic matter cycling in the Arctic. He was educated in and speaks three languages fluently (French, English, and Spanish). During his undergraduate degree, he also studied Mandarin in Mainland China as part of a Minor in East Asian Studies.