Lionel Lyles has come full circle.
He grew up on a farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, where he discovered the wonderment of what good soil could produce. He still tends to his own modest garden with the same love and care.
Born under Jim Crow in the Deep South, Lionel came of age during the Civil Rights Movement, inspired by icons such as: Malcolm X, Mary McCloud Bethune, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – who was assassinated right before Lionel enrolled at Southern University in 1968.
Lionel came to CU-Boulder as a graduate student in geography and was among the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in the field from the university. While there, he took an interest in the low numbers of Black graduate and undergraduate students, and he rubbed elbows with such CU luminaries as Black EOP Director William Pitts, professors William King and Charles Nilon, and CU Chancellor Mary Frances Berry – the only African American to occupy that post.
Over the course of a 40-year career, Dr. Lyles taught, or worked as an administrator, at the University of Northern Colorado, Morgan State University, and Southern University.
He collaborated on a NASA program to create a climate change report on the rising sea levels along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, and he was among the first to warn about the potential damage a major storm could wreak, just a few years before Hurricane Katrina devastated the region.
His climate change research took him the Bering Glacier in Alaska; to Paris, France; to Kampala, Uganda; to Nairobi, Kenya; to Tanzania’s Serengeti; to Accra, Ghana; to Benin, Togo; and to Auckland, New Zealand.
Good soil.
Please say hello to Lionel Lyles, Ph.D.
