Biographical Sketch

William Shotyk is from the Village of Swansea, now part of Toronto, Ontario. He received his B.Sc. (Agr.) in Soil Science and Chemistry from the University of Guelph and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Western Ontario. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Riverside and UWO, he worked at the University of Berne in Switzerland where he completed a Habilitation in Geochemistry, in 1995. He became Professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and Director of the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry, in October of 2000. He joined the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta in October of 2011, as the Bocock Chair in Agriculture and the Environment. He was awarded the Philippe Duchaufour Medal for Soil System Science by the European Geoscience Union (2013), elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2018), and a Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry (2019). He is the founder and President of the Elmvale Foundation, a federally registered charity for environmental education which hosts the annual Elmvale Water Festival (www.elmvale.org). Over the past 40 + years, with the help of family and friends, he has planted 25,000 + trees (more than 50 species) on his family farm property near Elmvale, Ontario.