Professor Dave Lewis was just named as the second holder of the Emery Castle Chair in Resource and Rural Economics! Congratulations to Dave!!
This Chair was founded by Emeritus Professor Emery N. Castle (1923-2017) to address issues in Oregon and nationally around resource and rural economics issues.
Professor Dave Lewis, who received his PhD from Oregon State University in 2005, specializes in environmental and natural resource economics. His research addresses economic issues related to land use, ecosystem service provision, and conservation science, and he uses microeconomic theory and micro-econometric tools to study how landowners make decisions, how land-use decisions affect ecosystem services, how the public values ecosystem services, and how conservation policy can be designed to provide ecosystem services.
Emery Castle passed away on October 2017 in Portland, Oregon, and this Chair continues in his honor. During his six decades as an active and internationally respected scholar, Emery Castle made outstanding contributions to agricultural and resource economics. Emery possessed a rare combination of scholarship and leadership. He served as OSU’s Dean of Faculty, Dean of the Graduate School, and Chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics (now Applied Economics).
From 1954 until he retired in 1993, five Oregon governors appointed Emery to Boards and Commissions that were focused on water resources and environmental quality. Emery chaired the National Rural Studies Committee from 1987 to 1997 and served as the inaugural Director of the OSU Rural Studies Program from 2001 to 2004. He was a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.