Rattan Lal is a professor of soil physics in the School of Natural Resources and Director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Services/Ohio Agriculture Research and Development Center, at the Ohio State University. Before joining Ohio State in 1987, he was a soil physicist for 18 years at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria. In Africa, Professor Lal conducted long-term experiments on land use, watershed management, soil erosion processes as influenced by rainfall characteristics, soil properties, methods of deforestation, soil-tillage and crop-residue management, cropping systems including cover crops and agroforestry, and mixed/relay cropping methods. He has served on the Panel on Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment in the Humid Tropics of the National Academy of Sciences. He has authored and coauthored about 1400 research papers. He has also written 13 and edited or coedited 45 books.
