Will Lockhart
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute on the Environment, U. Minnesota. Research scientist in sustainability, astrophysicist, and director of the first feature documentary on the game of Go.
You can reach me at wlock@umn.edu.
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Welcome to my website!
I am a Research Fellow at the Institute on the Environment (IonE) working at the intersection of data science and sustainability. A physicist by training, I have expertise in modeling, data analysis and visualization, and thinking about complex systems in general. Lately my focus has been on the ecological overshoot crisis and questions around how humanity can create a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable future.
Research:
My current research centers on the environmental impacts of land use in the United States. Agriculture now takes up nearly half of all habitable land on Earth (the majority of which goes to feeding livestock), and is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater depletion, and biodiversity loss. At the same time, food is essential for human survival - so to create a sustainable world we must fix our agricultural system. I work on developing IonE’s Food System Supply-chain Sustainability (FoodS3) model, which traces the impacts of US agriculture through the food supply chain. This will enable more accurate, region-specific carbon footprinting for the meat and dairy industries. I am also involved in a joint project between IonE and the US Forest Service on carbon accounting, using geospatial data to create detailed maps of carbon sources and sinks.
I began my academic career as a physicist, and wrote my PhD dissertation on the study of black hole images from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an experiment to image the near-horizon region of a supermassive black hole for the first time. Building on existing techniques, but with an analysis code built from scratch, I investigated the degree of uncertainty in the key features of these reconstructed images, and whether there is evidence for the elusive “photon ring” effect predicted by general relativity. For more on this and other physics projects, see the physics tab.
Teaching:
I enjoy the challenge of boiling down complex problems and conveying abstract ideas to a general audience. I have several years’ experience as a teaching assistant (TA) for the freshman undergraduate physics courses at the University of Arizona: 141 (Mechanics) and 241 (Electricity & Magnetism).
I am a nationally ranked 5-dan Go player, and I have taught Go both in private lessons and group workshops.
My film:
From 2012-2016 I directed a feature-length documentary film, The Surrounding Game, about the game of Go. The project was a labor of love, a worldly adventure, and my attempt to synthesize all the emotions and philosophical questions the game inspires in me. The movie is available to buy or rent on the website through Vimeo-on-Demand - go watch it! Or see the Film tab for more info.
