Prof. Fritz Davis, the leader of the McDonnell Initiative Ecosystems Regeneration Working Group, has been named the Head of the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, effective April 1, 2019. Prof. Davis studied History of Science at Harvard before completing his Ph.D. in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale. He first joined the History faculty at Purdue in 2016, as a Professor of History and the R. Mark Lubbers Chair in the History of Science. Davis’s books include Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology (Yale, 2014) and The Man Who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology (Oxford, 2007). His present research interests, in addition to leading the Ecosystems Regeneration Working Group, include a project documenting the history of Rachel Carson’s writing of Silent Spring. Carson’s 1962 book exposed many risks of pesticides to humans and the environment, and helped spark the environmental movement in the US. Aside from the McDonnell Initiative, Davis’s work has been supported by various granting institutions, including the US National Science Foundation, the US National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health), and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright).