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2012 Breakthrough Senior Fellows
Barry W. Brook, a leading environmental scientist and modeller, is a Research Professor in ecology and conservation biology at the University of Adelaide's
Environment Institute. He holds the
Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, and has published three books, over 200 refereed scientific papers, is a highly-cited researcher, and regularly writes popular articles for the media. He has received a number of distinguished awards for his research excellence and public outreach, including the Australian Academy of Science
Fenner Medal and the
2010 Community Science Educator of the Year. His research interests are climate change impacts, species extinctions, simulation and statistical modelling, energy systems analysis (with a focus on modelling future nuclear and large-scale renewable energy scenarios), and synergistic human impacts on the biosphere.
He runs a popular climate science and energy options blog at Brave New Climate, has written a popular book on sustainable nuclear energy, is an International Award Committee member for the Global Energy Prize, and considers himself a 'Promethean environmentalist'. Prometheans are realists who shuns romantic notions that modern governments might guide society back to an era when people lived simpler lives, or that a vastly less consumption-oriented world is a possibility. Prometheans seek real, high-capacity solutions to environmental challenges - such as nuclear power and other techno-fixes - which history has shown to be reliable and timely.
To contact Barry Brook for an interview, please click here.
Erle Ellis is an environmental scientist at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a leading theorist of what scientists increasingly describe as the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Ellis has described the extent of humankind's impact on the planet, from extinctions and massive landscape changes caused by hunter-gatherers to the trend of growing agricultural productivity in response to population pressures. Ellis' early work focused on long-term ecological changes across China's village landscapes caused by the transition from traditional to industrially-based agricultural systems. Ellis has recently theorized the concept of "anthromes," as an alternative concept to "biomes," focusing specifically on human management and stewardship of hybrid human-natural systems.
To contact Erle Ellis for an interview, please click here.
Jane Long chaired
a comprehensive analysis that concluded that both aggressive deployment of known energy technologies and major amounts of innovation will be needed for California to meet its climate goals. She is Principal Associate Director at Large for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Fellow in the LLNL Center for Global Strategic Research. Long is co-chair of both the California's Energy Future Committee and the National Commission on Energy Policy's Task Force on Geoengineering, and a member of the governor's advisory panel on adaptation. She is the former Dean of the Mackay School of Mines at University of Nevada, Reno, Director of the Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy and Chairman of the Nevada State Task Force on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Dr. Long also worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she served as Department Chair for the Energy Resources Technology Department including geothermal and fossil fuel research, and the Environmental Research Department.
To contact Jane Long for an interview, please click here.
Burton Richter won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976 for his co-discovery of a new sub-atomic particle. In 2009, Richter organized 30 Nobel laureates to petition President Obama to significantly increase energy innovation funding. Richter is the author of
Smoke and Mirrors, a book arguing for a more pragmatic and scientific approach to global warming. Richter served as Director of the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory (formerly Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and is today Senior Fellow of Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Woods Institute on the Environment, and Precourt Institute on Energy. Richter received the American Association for the Advancement of Science Philip Hauge Abelson Prize (2007) for his world-class contributions to research, his successful management of a leading scientific laboratory, and his unrelenting efforts to advance science and to promote its responsible use in shaping public policy.
To contact Burton Richter for an interview, please click here.
Mark Sagoff is one of the country's
most esteemed public policy philosophers, and head of George Mason University's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. Over the last several years, Sagoff has been a trenchant critic of the "scientization" of ecological issues, arguing that environmentalism must speak directly to social values. Sagoff has also been a critic of failed efforts by environmentalists to "price" natural systems in order to protect them. His books
The Economy of the Earth, (2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2008) and
Price, Principle, and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2004) are considered landmarks in the field. Sagoff has been a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
To contact Mark Sagoff for an interview, please click here.
Tom Wigley is one of the world's most widely-cited and respected climate researchers. He served as head of the East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the 1970s and developed a
widely-used climate model (MAGICC) while at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Emails released from the CRU revealed poor behavior from some scientists but showed Wigley pushing for greater transparency and fair play. In 2008, Wigley joined Roger Pielke Jr. and Christopher Green, also Breakthrough Senior Fellows, in co-authoring an influential commentary in
Nature showing that the IPCC was making highly optimistic and
"dangerous assumptions" about how much of a role energy efficiency could play in reducing greenhouse gases. Like NASA climate scientist James Hansen, Wigley has become an outspoken advocate of nuclear power.
To contact Tom Wigley for an interview, please click here.
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2011 Breakthrough Senior Fellows
Fred Block is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Davis. His recent work has focused on documenting the substantial role that the U.S. government plays in technology development across the civilian economy. During the last thirty years while policymakers and pundits were singing the praises of "free markets", the reality was that the public sector significantly expanded its efforts to move research breakthroughs from the laboratory to the market. His new book,
State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development, co-edited with Matthew R. Keller (Paradigm Publishers) contains a series of case studies that document different dimensions of this recently constructed innovation system. His current research centers on the kinds of financial reforms and new institutions required to supports innovation in this new context of public-private collaboration. His earlier books include
The Origins of International Economic Disorder (1977),
Postindustrial Possibilities (1990), and
The Vampire State (1996).
To contact Fred Block for an interview, please click here.
Chris Foreman A Nonresident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, Chris Foreman is also director of the social policy program at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy where he writes and teaches about the politics of national domestic policy and inequality.
Chris Foreman is perhaps best known in environmental circles for his landmark book The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice in which he discusses both the possibilities and pitfalls of addressing environmental inequalities. Foreman has followed up this work with several articles and discussions and has testified on environmental justice in front of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Foreman argues that while environmental equity is now a key aspect of our dialogue about environmental policy, equity is still not a large part of environmental policy in practice. In order to truly address environmental equity, Foreman argues that we should focus less on cancer and more on the prosaic but widespread issues of dirt, pollution, noise, and congestion.
To contact Chris Foreman for an interview, please click here.
Peter Kareiva a veteran of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and is now the Chief Scientist and Vice President at The Nature Conservancy where he works as a researcher and practitioner on science-based conservation issues.
A star academic and researcher, Peter Kareiva has published over 100 scientific articles on topics ranging from genetically engineered organisms to landscape ecology to climate change. Kareiva has taught at a number of universities including Brown University, the University of Washington, and Stanford University. He is the co-founder of the Nature Capital Project. Kareiva is an advocate of effective science communication and a firm believer that environmental conservation must be tied to human well-being. He has recently released two new books. The first, Conservation Science: Balancing the Needs of People and Nature, (written with Michelle Marvier) repudiates the myth that the goal of preserving nature is opposed to that of human development. Natural Capital, (edited by Peter Kareiva, Gretchen Daily, Taylor Ricketts, Heather Tallis and Steve Polasky) published by Oxford University Press, explains the models and economic tools for making the business of nature clear. Download a copy of the profile here.
To contact Peter Kareiva for an interview, please click here.
Steve Rayner The James Martin Professor and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, Rayner describes himself as "an 'undisciplined' scholar, committed to changing the world through social science."
Steve Rayner is a widely known interdisciplinary expert in the fields of science and climate change policy, and an early critic of the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations framework for climate change. Rayner argues that climate change is a "wicked" problem encompassing complex and open-ended information that cannot be solved by a simple top-down solution, such as the Kyoto Protocol. Rayner was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for six years and also served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the second, third, and fourth assessment reports. Following Barack Obama's election, Wired magazine featured Rayner on their 2008 Smart List of people the president should listen to.
To contact Steve Rayner for an interview, please click here.
Harry Saunders The Managing Director of Decision Processes Incorporated, Harry Saunders has consulted at numerous Fortune 100 companies including Chevron, General Motors, and Hewlett Packard, helping executive teams make higher quality decisions in the face of risk.
The 'Godfather of rebound,' Harry Saunders is widely known as an international expert on energy efficiency and consumption and has also published articles in the fields of evolutionary biology and legal theory. Following Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes' work on energy consumption and behavior, Saunders coined the "Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate" which broadly states that increased energy efficiency leads to increased energy consumption. Most recently, Saunders surveyed and analyzed thirty sectors of the United States economy for historical evidence of rebound. Based on his analyses and historical records, Saunders argues that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimates for carbon emissions reduction are based on improper estimations of the rebound effect. A former Manager of Strategy at Tosco Corporation, Saunders has also worked at the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Energy Agency.
To contact Harry Saunders for an interview, please click here.
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2010 Breakthrough Senior Fellows
Ulrich Beck How wealthy nations manage risks like climate change has been the life-long work of one of Germany's leading sociologists, Ulrich Beck, author of the landmark "Risk Society." Beck has argued that as societies like Europe and the U.S. get richer and more developed they change their relationship to modern institutions like the nation. Beck calls these "second modern" societies because they are becoming more modern, not leaving modernity behind. On the one hand this can be positive and Beck writes of the need for a new global cosmopolitanism, but it can also create contradictions, with second modern individuals feeling little desire to make the kinds of investments nation states have traditionally made in infrastructure and technology to create prosperity and development.
To contact Ulrich Beck for an interview, please click here.
Chris Green is Professor of Economics at McGill University in Montreal. Green received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1966. He taught three years at North Carolina State University before moving to McGill in 1969, where he has been ever since. Over his more than 43 years as University teacher and researcher his interests have ranged widely. His PhD dissertation and first book (published by the Brookings Institution in 1967) was on negative income taxes and the poverty problem. After researching and teaching several years in the public finance and labor fields, Green's interests moved to industrial organization and public policies toward business, in particular antitrust (or competition) policies and economic regulation. In the late 1980s, Chris Green became interested in the climate change problem. Gradually his research and some of his teaching moved in this direction. Beginning in 1994, Green began teaching a course on the "Economics of Climate Change"--a course he now teaches regularly. Green has authored or co-authored papers on climate change-related topics, beginning with two papers that appeared in Climatic Change in 1992. Most of his work has centered on the relation between stabilizing climate and energy technology change. His
most recent work, with Isabel Galiana, prepared for the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate project, sets out and analyzes a proposed technology-led climate policy. Download his CV
here.
Read "Let the global technology race begin" by Chris Green in Nature.
To contact Chris Green for an interview, please click here.
Bruno Latour is a founder of science and technology studies (STS) and was listed as the
10th most-cited intellectual in the humanities and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide. His 1979 "Laboratory Life" was a watershed ethnography of how science works in the real world. Latour studied scientists and found that subjective judgments that look unscientific to outsiders are central to the scientific enterprise. In his most famous work, "We Have Never Been Modern," Latour's argues that modernity is a kind of faith characterized by efforts to purify concepts like nature and science even as they become invariably mixed up in politics, society, religion, and tradition.
To contact Bruno Latour for an interview, please click here.
Gregory Nemet is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He is also a member of the university's Energy Sources and Policy Cluster and a senior fellow at the university's Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy. His research and teaching focus on improving understanding of the environmental, social, economic, and technical dynamics of the global energy system. He teaches courses in international environmental policy and energy systems analysis. A central focus of his research involves empirical analysis of the process of innovation and technological change. He is particularly interested in how the outcomes of this line of research can inform public policy related to improvements in low-carbon energy technologies. His work is motivated by a more general interest in issues related to energy and the environment, including how government actions can expand access to energy services while reducing their environmental impacts. He is a lead author of the Global Energy Assessment. He holds a master's degree and doctorate in energy and resources, both from the University of California, Berkeley. His undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College is in geography and economics.
You can read two of his key papers on energy and technology policy here and here; or find all of Greg's publications on La Follette's website.
To contact Gregory Nemet for an interview, please click here.
Daniel Sarewitz is Professor of Science and Society and Co-Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (
CSPO), at Arizona State University. His work focuses on revealing the connections between science policy decisions, scientific research and social outcomes. How does the distribution of the social benefits of science relate to the way that we organize scientific inquiry? What accounts for the highly uneven advance of know-how related to solving human problems? How do the interactions between scientific uncertainty and human values influence decision making? How does technological innovation influence politics? And how can improved insight into such questions contribute to improved real-world practice? From 1989-1993 he worked on R&D policy issues as a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and principal speech writer for Committee Chairman George E. Brown, Jr.. He received a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Cornell University in 1986. He now directs the Washington, DC, office of CSPO, and concentrates his efforts on increasing CSPO's impact on federal science and technology policy processes.
See Dan's Nature article, "Three Rules for Technological Fixes"
To contact Daniel Sarewitz for an interview, please click here.
Bill Weihl is Green Energy Czar at Google, where he leads efforts in energy efficiency and renewable energy, and also manages the company's greenhouse-gas footprint. He spearheaded Google's drive to become carbon neutral, helped found the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, and helped create the RE<C initiative to develop renewable energy cheaper than coal. He has extensive business and technical experience in high-tech, including ten years as a professor of Computer Science at MIT, five years as a research scientist at Digital's Systems Research Center, and five years as Chief Architect and then CTO of Akamai Technologies. He was recently named one of Time Magazine's
2009 Heroes of the Environment.
To contact Bill Weihl for an interview, please click here.
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2009 Breakthrough Senior Fellows
David Douglas is a high-tech executive with a strong focus on innovation and sustainability. Most recently Dave was Senior Vice President of Cloud Computing and Chief Sustainability Officer at Sun Microsystems. As CSO he oversaw the strategy and execution of Sun's environmental initiatives, including enhancements to Sun's products in the areas of energy efficiency, cooling technologies, product recycling and clean manufacturing, and improvements in the sustainability of Sun's operations. Dave has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. He is on the board of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a Sr. Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, founder and advisor to the Energy Innovation Tracker, and an advisor Boston Rising. Dave is co-author of the book "Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering". Dave is currently consulting in the areas of sustainability, technology and business strategy.
Read more from David Douglas here at his blog "Near Walden".
To contact David Douglas for an interview, please click here.
Frank Laird is an expert in energy policy, specializing in renewable energy policy. He is an authority on the history of renewable energy policy development in the U.S. Frank, an associate professor of technology and public policy, teaches at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. His teaching and research interests focus on environmental policy, energy policy, science and technology policy, and public policy more generally. Most of Frank's research has focused on energy policy, particularly the linkage between renewable energy policies and environmental policy. His book
Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values was a finalist for 2004 Don K. Price Award for the best book in science and technology policy or politics. Frank has chaired and served on the public policy committee the American Solar Energy Society, during which time he served on the Society's board of directors. He has recently collaborated with the Consortium on Science Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University on a project applying the lessons of innovation policy to energy.
Read Frank's articles "Just Say No to Greenhouse Gas Emissions Targets" and "A Full-Court Press for Renewable Energy".
To contact Frank Laird for an interview, please click here.
Siddhartha Shome is an engineer who is passionately interested in various social, political, environmental and technological issues. Born and raised in India, he is particularly interested in questions related to India and other developing societies such as how to reconcile the seeming conflict between the goals of environmentalism and development. After finishing his engineering Bachelor's degree in India, Siddhartha came to the U.S. for graduate studies. In 2000, he completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Iowa. Currently he works at
Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) in San Jose, CA, developing mechanical design and simulation software. Outside of work he loves to mull over myriad social issues. He is also involved in a number of social causes. He is an active volunteer for
Asha for Education, a group that works to spread basic education in India. He has played a leading role in Asha's Silicon Valley chapter. He is also involved in
Manushi, an organization that works for social and governance reform in India, particularly on issues involving women, the urban poor, etc.
Read some of his Breakthrough Blog posts here, and check out his own blog here.
To contact Siddhartha Shome for an interview, please click here.
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2008 Breakthrough Senior Fellows
Bill Chaloupka, an expert on the use of resentment to power the anti-environmentalist backlash, is co-editor of the forthcoming Post-Environmentalism, an anthology of international academic responses to the death of environmentalism thesis. He is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where he has worked since 2002, serving as chair of the department from 2002-2007. Prior to that, he taught environmental studies and political science at the University of Montana in Missoula since the early 1980s, and previously taught at Ball State University and the University of New Mexico. He teaches political theory, environmental thought, and American politics. His books include
Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (1999),
Knowing Nukes: Politics and Culture of the Atom (1992) and, co-edited with Jane Bennett,
In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Chaloupka was co-editor of the journal Theory & Event from 1999-2005. He is currently working on a book about environmental politics in the U.S.
Read his essays "Thinking Like a Mountain" and "What is to be Done?". Also, find more by Bill on the Breakthrough blog: "One Reason not to dis Barack Obama" a review of Bill's work by Breakthrough President Michael Shellenberger "How Scientism Enervated Environmentalism", as well as his exclusive Breakthrough interview.
To contact Bill Chaloupka for an interview, please click here.
Dalton Conley is currently Dean for the Social Sciences, as well as University Professor at New York University. He also holds appointments at NYU's
Wagner School of Public Service, as an Adjunct Professor of
Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER), and as a Senior Advisor to the UN Millennium Project. Conley's research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity within and across generations. In this vein, he studies sibling differences in socioeconomic success; racial inequalities; the salience of physical appearance to economic status; the measurement of class; and how health and biology affect (and are affected by) social position. In 2005, he became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation's
Alan T. Waterman Award, given annually to one young researcher in any field of science, mathematics or engineering. Conley holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.P.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, as well as an M.S. in Biology from NYU. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying transgenerational phenotypic plasticity and socially regulated genes. Conley is a frequent contributor of Op-Ed pieces and other essays to the mainstream press; he has written for the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Forbes, Salon, Boston Review and Time Magazine.
Read his New York Times article "Go on a Savings Spree".
To contact Dalton Conley for an interview, please click here.
Marty Hoffert wrote the landmark 2002 article in the journal
Science that concluded global warming was a clean energy problem, not a regulation problem. He is Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University. He holds a B.S. (1960) in aeronautical engineering from the University of Michigan; an M.S. (1964) and Ph.D. (1967) in astronautics from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (1969) from the New School for Social Research where he did graduate work in sociology and economics. He has published broadly in fluid mechanics, plasma physics, oceanography, planetary atmospheres, climatic change, solar and wind energy and space solar power. His geophysical research includes the ocean/climate model first employed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to assess global warming for different scenarios of fossil fuel use. His energy research includes laboratory and full-scale experiments on wind turbines, photovoltaic hydrogen production and wireless power transmission for solar power satellites. His present efforts focus on sustainable carbon-neutral technologies to power high-tech civilization consilient with a biodiverse planet. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Marty has been featured on the New York Times Dot Earth blog, where he was also shown discussing the Department of Energy's new energy R&D agency, ARPA-E. You can also watch him speaking at Google.
To contact Marty Hoffert for an interview, please click here.
Roger Pielke, Jr. has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). At CIRES, Roger served as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research from 2001-2007. Roger's research focuses on the intersection of science and technology and decision making. In 2006 Roger received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. Before joining the University of Colorado, from 1993-2001 Roger was a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Roger is a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute. He is also author, co-author or co-editor of seven books, including
The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His most recent book is
The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell you About Global Warming (September, 2010, Basic Books).
Read more of his writing at Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog. Also, check out his Breakthrough interview.
To contact Roger Pielke for an interview, please click here.
Jim Proctor, an expert in the role of science and religion in environmental thought, has brought together numerous groups of scholars to re-examine concepts of nature underlying contemporary environmentalism, and is co-author of several resultant volumes, including his work with Bill Chaloupka on the forthcoming
After Environmentalism. Jim is Professor and Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Before coming to Oregon, Jim spent 13 teaching in the geography department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1980 with a degree in religious studies and went on to work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, southern Africa. He later attended graduate school in geography and environmental science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Read his article, "Environment After Nature".
To contact Jim Proctor for an interview, please click here.
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