Dean Emeritus honored with lectureship

Dean Emeritus J. Michael Kelly was honored by the Soil Science Society of America with the 2013 Sergei A. Wilde Distinguished Lectureship on Forest Soils. Kelly’s lecture at the society’s annual meeting — titled “Application of Minimalist Mechanistic Nutrient Uptake Models to Woody Plants, Have We Learned Anything Useful?”— presented a review of his more than 30 years of work on the subject.

Based on his long-term research, Kelly made several insightful suggestions for future research in the field and concluded that future improvements in methodology and models will most likely be brought about by close collaboration between experimentalists and modelers. The named lectureship honors the leadership of Sergei A. Wilde, a Russian immigrant and long-time faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, in the evolution of forest soil science in the 20th century.