THOMAS HOMER-DIXON

Biographical Statement
Thomas Homer-Dixon, or "Tad" as his friends and colleagues know him, is Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1956 and grew up in a rural area outside the city. After studying for two years at the University of Victoria in the late-1970s, he moved to Ottawa, where in 1980 he received his BA in Political Science from Carleton University. He then founded a national student organization that encouraged debate on the ethical implications of scientific research, and he traveled widely overseas.

In 1983, Thomas began graduate work in Political Science at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied international relations, defense and arms control policy, cognitive science, environmental science, and conflict theory. After completing his PhD in 1989, he moved to the University of Toronto and, in the subsequent eight years, led several international research projects examining the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries.

Recently, his research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on political science, economics, environmental studies, geography, cognitive science, social psychology, and complex systems theory.

Dr. Homer-Dixon teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental security; causes of war, revolution, and ethnic conflict; international relations; and philosophy of social science. In 1999 he received the University of Toronto's Northrop Frye Teaching Award for integrating teaching and research. His writings have appeared in leading scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. His books include The Ingenuity Gap (Knopf, 2000), which won the 2001 Governor General's Non-fiction Award; Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton University Press, 1999), which received the 2000 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize from the American Political Science Association; and, co-edited with Jessica Blitt, Ecoviolence: Links among Environment, Population, and Security (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

Personal Connection
I grew up in a rural area outside of Victoria, British Columbia, in the 1950s and 1960s. My father worked as a forester, and my mother was an artist and illustrator of wildlife, so as a young boy I learned to love the outdoors and take an interest in environmental issues. I attended Glenlyon Preparatory School in Oak Bay until grade 10 and then moved on to Claremont High School in Saanich. After three years working in resource industries throughout BC, I completed the first half of my BA at the University of Victoria. Although I left the city permanently in 1978, I still return several times a year to see my father, who has retired to Metchosin, and I still regard BC as my home.