Harold A. Mooney, Ph.D., holds the Paul S. Achilles Professorship in Environmental Biology at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1960 and was an Associate Professor at the University of California in Los Angeles until 1968, when he came to Stanford.

Mooney's research on the carbon balance of plants has provided a major theoretical framework for ecophysiological studies, and has been instrumental in the incorporation of physiological understanding to studies of ecosystem processes. This work has also led to several lines of research on the nature of interactions of plants with their biotic environment, and has provided an objective measure for evaluating many of the current theories of plant-animal interaction. He has demonstrated that convergent evolution takes place in the properties of different ecosystems that are subject to comparable climates, and has pioneered in the study of the allocation of resources in plants.

He has worked in many of Earth's diverse ecosystems, including the arctic-alpine, the Mediterranean-climate scrub and grasslands, tropical wet and dry forests, and the deserts of the world. He is currently engaged in research on the impacts of global change on terrestrial ecosystems, especially on productivity and biodiversity, and is also examining those factors that promote the invasions of non-indigenous plant species.

In recent years he has been involved in organizing international activities to bring together people from many diverse disciplines to address topics that promise to contribute substantially to the advancement and integration of ecology. Most recent of these are the programs on A Global Strategy for Invasive Species and on the Ecosystem Function of Biodiversity, both sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE). He worked to develop a global program on biodiversity science (Diversitas) and its associated project, the International Biodiversity Observation Year (IBOY). He served on the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE) program and was Chair of the U.S. Global Change Committee.

Mooney recently served as Secretary General of the International Council for Science (ICSU). Currently he is a Scientific Panel Co-Chair for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a program devoted to strengthening the capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-being. Through these efforts and his lengthy publication record of more than 400 scientific books, papers, and articles, he has developed bridges between physiological ecology and other areas of ecology, and he has explored the contributions that ecologists can make toward resolving the growing problems of global habitability.

Mooney has served on many editorial boards for ecological journals, and on advisory committees of many funding agencies, universities, and national and international agencies. He served as President of the Ecological Society from 1988-89 and as President of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 1993, and is currently Secretary General of the International Council for Science. He is an editor on Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Environment and Pollution, Global Change Biology, Global Environmental Research, Ecosystems, Journal of Mediterranean Ecology, and Biological Invasions, as well as Series editor of Physiological Ecology (Academic Press), and Ecological Studies (Springer-Verlag).

Mooney has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has received the Eminent Ecologist Award and the Mercer Award of the Ecological Society of America, a Humboldt Senior Distinguished U.S. Scientist Award, the Max Planck Research Award, the Ecology Institute Prize for Terrestrial Ecology, the Nevada Medal Award, and the Blue Planet Prize. He worked in Chile and France as a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and in Australia and Africa as a Guggenheim Fellow. He was chosen as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the Ecological Society of America, the British Ecological Society, Sigma Xi, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences.