Tim Filley, Ph.D.
Professor and Executive Director
Email: filley@ou.edu
Tim Filley, Ph.D. is professor and executive director of the Institute for Resilient Environmental and Energy Systems (IREES) and the Latin America Sustainability Initiative (LASI) at the University of Oklahoma. Upon joining OU in August 2021, Filley established LASI to catalyze, support and scale collaborations with partners in Latin America to address complex environmental, human health, and societal challenges across the hemisphere. He brings over a decade of leadership and demonstrated success in global engagement through development of strategic international collaborations.
In 2022, Filley created and now directs the Institute for Global Change and Human Health in partnership with Universidad Nacional de San Agustín (UNSA) in Arequipa, Peru. He continues his work advancing sustainable land use practices among small farmers holders in the Peruvian Amazon and co-leads a USAID-funded program to incorporate soil chemistry principles, measures of assessment of soil health, soil and weather sensor monitoring, and crop suitability assessments into a value chain for profitable and resilient agriculture in the region of San Martin, Peru.
Filley is the architect and founding director of the Arequipa Nexus Institute, a large-scale research, education and innovation partnership established in 2017 between UNSA and Purdue University to help position UNSA as a leader of sustainable development in Latin America. The UNSA-Purdue partnership was initiated with a network of 21 interrelated, interdisciplinary research projects and supporting infrastructure designed to identify regional interdependencies among food, water, and energy systems, and explore tradeoffs between land use and the environment in the Arequipa region of Peru. Over 60 Purdue faculty and postdoctoral scholars, 97 UNSA faculty, and dozens of undergraduate students were supported by this effort. In January 2021, Filley negotiated a 5-year continuation of the partnership. He oversaw, with UNSA collaborator Juan Lopa, Ph.D., the completion of the new Nexus Stable Isotope Geochemistry laboratory—the first such laboratory in the public university system in Peru.
From 2012 to 2016, Filley was the director of the U.S.-China Ecopartnership for Environmental Sustainability (USCEES). Established by the U.S. Department of State and the China National Development and Reform Commission, the USCEES fostered bilateral research innovation, communication, and entrepreneurship by developing strategies for scientific collaborations across Purdue University, the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, three Chinese Academy of Sciences Institutes, China Nanjing Agriculture University, and Shenyang Agriculture University.
Filley’s research and teaching are centered on the fundamental processes controlling carbon and nitrogen cycling in both natural and managed ecosystems. Most recently, his research focuses on soil dynamics, including within intensively managed landscapes stretching from the coastal irrigated deserts in Peru, to the plains of Northeast China, to the agricultural fields of the glaciated Midwest of the United States. A primary goal of this work is to develop a stronger scientific basis for modeling soil organic matter dynamics, ecosystem and critical zone processes, and the global carbon cycle with an emphasis on how ecosystem perturbations—woody plant encroachment, fire, agriculture, invasive species, storm events—influence soil properties to sequester or release carbon and nitrogen.
Filley received his Ph.D. in geosciences from the Pennsylvania State University in 1997 and he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C. in 2000. He was a professor of biogeochemistry at Purdue University from 2000 to 2021, where he remains adjunct professor.
