Josef Görres
Josef Görres is the founder and co-director of the Healthy Soil Collaborative. He brings a systems approach and problem-solving focus to the challenge of invasive earthworms. Görres also directly contributes to the HSC’s research agenda via his lab in the University of Vermont’s Plant and Soil Science Department, where he explores jumping worm biology and impacts on sensitive ecosystems.
Görres received his PhD in physics from the University of Manchester, UK, and spent nearly a decade in paper manufacturing before pivoting towards environmental preservation. Görres retrained in natural resources at the University of Rhode Island in 1991, and learned to apply his physics expertise to soil science and ecology.
Görres’ goal in forming the Healthy Soil Collaborative is to create a cooperative group in the spirit of an R&D team, uniting multidisciplinary researchers with the breadth of knowledge and proximity to the jumping worm invasions, to comprehensively tackle the problem.
In his spare time, he likes to read—particularly crime and classic science fiction—and get outside for a hike in the woods. Although when time truly allows, he particularly loves to get out in the world and explore very different environments and cultures in far-flung locales like Italy and Spain.
