Nair, P. K. Ramachandran

Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Agroforestry & International Forestry

P.K. Nair is a pioneering and leading researcher and educator in Agroforestry. He was born in Kerala, India. He has a Ph.D. in agronomy from Pantnagar Agricultural University, India; and a Dr. Sc. agr. degree from Goettingen University, Germany. He has also been a post-doctoral fellow at Rothamsted, England.

P.K. joined the School as a professor in 1987, and was named Distinguished Professor in 2001. Before joining the School he worked for nine years in Nairobi, Kenya, with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) (now, World Agroforestry Centre), of which he is one of the founders. Prior to that he worked for five years in southern India where he developed the multistory cropping system with tree crops, which would later become an example of the sustainable multistrata agroforestry systems of the tropics.

Professor Nair has been the Editor-in-Chief of Agroforestry Systems during 1994 – 2005. He also served as a consulting editor of Plant and Soil for six years. Currently he is the series editor of Advances in Agroforestry book-series (Springer Science), which he helped establish in 2004; and the Chief Editor of the Agroecology and Land Use section of the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science. He has served, and continues to serve, as a reviewer for numerous high-ranking scientific journals and national and international committees. His vision and leadership in organizing the World Congresses in Agroforestry (the first in Florida, 2004, the second in Nairobi, 2009, and the third in New Delhi, 2014) are widely acknowledged.

Professor Nair has delivered keynote presentations in a large number of professional gatherings around the world, and conducted training courses in several countries. His publications include 16 books (author/editor), 70 book chapters, and 200+ peer-reviewed papers in leading journals. His Google Scholar statistics (01 December 2018): Citations: 24,166; h-index: 75; i-10 index: 245