Rate My Professor André Franco

André Franco is an assistant professor in the Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, a position he has held since 2022. Prior to this, he was a research scientist in the Department of Biology at Colorado State University. Franco earned his PhD in Soil Science from the University of São Paulo in Piracicaba, Brazil, in 2015, an MS in Bioenergy from Universidade Estadual de Londrina in 2012, and a BS in Agronomy from Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz in 2008. He also holds the title of Senior Global Futures Fellow at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. His research centers on soil ecology, investigating how global environmental changes influence soils across diverse ecosystems, from tropical crop fields and rainforests to temperate grasslands. Franco's work elucidates the critical roles of soil macrofauna, such as nematodes, earthworms, and termites, in mediating ecosystem responses to climate shifts and land-use changes. His research areas include Ecology and Conservation, and Sustainability and Sustainable Development, with emphasis on soil-plant interactions and ecosystem functioning.

Franco has garnered notable recognition, including the International Presidential Fellowship at Colorado State University in 2017, the Fischer Faculty Fellowship at Indiana University in 2026, and a 2026 Indiana University Trustees' Teaching Award. In 2026, he received a $737,000 grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture for the project 'Integrating soil animals into the soil health framework to foster multifunctionality in regenerative agroecosystems,' which examines invertebrate contributions to soil health metrics across Midwest agroecosystems. His influential publications include 'Global distribution of earthworm diversity' in Science (2019), 'Drought suppresses soil predators and promotes root herbivores in mesic, but not in xeric grasslands' in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019), 'Soil quality indexing strategies for evaluating sugarcane expansion in Brazil' in PLOS ONE (2016), and 'Loss of soil (macro)fauna due to the expansion of Brazilian sugarcane acreage' in Science of the Total Environment (2016). These works have advanced knowledge on soil biodiversity, sustainable land management, and carbon dynamics, informing practices for agriculture, conservation, and climate resilience.