Julie A. Wrigley and Foundation Professor, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University

Osvaldo Sala is Julie A. Wrigley, Regents, and Foundation Professor, at Arizona State University where he serves in the School of Sustainability and School of Life Sciences. He is also the Founding Director of the Global Drylands Center. He came to ASU in 2010 from Brown University where he was the Director of the Environmental Change Initiative. Osvaldo Sala received PhD and MSc from Colorado State University.

Osvaldo is a dryland ecologist working from the local to the global levels. He is known for his global analyses of drylands and large-scale field manipulative experiments simulating climate change around the world. At the global scale, he participated in several assessments from the Global Biodiversity Assessment and the IPCC to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He has developed highly cited (>12,000 citations) scenarios of biodiversity change for the year 2100. He has had prolific scientific production with more than 72,000 citations and H=114 as of September 2025.  His work has been truly transdisciplinary, collaborating with geologists, social scientists, mathematicians and humanists.

Osvaldo has received several recognitions to his academic work including being an elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of Argentina, the Argentinean National Academy of Physical and Natural Sciences, Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America.