Appendix C: Committee Biographies
Warren M. Washington (NAE, Chair) is a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He has published more than 150 papers in professional journals and co-authored a book entitled, An Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling. He has served on the National Science Board (chair, 2002-2006), the NOAA Science Advisory Board, President’s National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, several panels of the National Research Council, the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board, among others. Washington areas of research are in the development and use of climate models for climate change studies. He has also served as President of American Meteorological Society and a member of the AAAS Board of Directors. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received many awards, including the Le Verrier Medal of the Societe Meteorologique de France, the National Weather Service Modernization Award, and the AMS Dr. Charles Anderson Award. He has honorary degrees from the Oregon State University and Bates College, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama.
Kai N. Lee (Vice Chair) is the Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies, emeritus, at Williams College. He retired in 2015 from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where he led the Science program for eight years. He taught at Williams College from 1991 to 2007 and he directed the Center for Environmental Studies from 1991 to 1998 and 2001 to 2002. He also taught from 1973 to 1991 at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of Compass and Gyroscope (1993) and coauthor of Our Common Journey (NRC, 1999) and Humans in the Landscape (2012). He is a National Associate of the National Research Council. He was a member of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology and served as vice-chair of the National Academies panel that wrote Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate (2009). Earlier, he had been a White House Fellow and represented the state of Washington as a member of the Northwest Power Planning Council. He was appointed in 2009 to the Science Advisory Board of the EPA. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University and an A.B., Magna Cum Laude in Physics, from Columbia University.
Doug Arent is Executive Director of the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He specializes in strategic planning and financial analysis competencies; clean energy technologies and energy and water issues; and international and governmental policies. In addition to his NREL responsibilities, Arent is Sr. Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Arent was recently appointed as a Coordinating Lead Author for the 5th Assessment Report of IPCC. He is a member of Policy Subcommittee of the National Petroleum Council Study on Prudent Development of North America Natural Gas and Oil Resources, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Steering Committee on Social Science and the
Alternative Energy Future. Arent served from 2008 to 2010 on the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change. Arent is, a Member of the Keystone Energy Board and is on the Advisory Board of E+Co, a public purpose investment company that supports sustainable development across the globe. He served on the Executive Council of the U.S. Association of Energy Economists from 2008 to 2010. Prior to coming to his current position, Arent was Director of the Strategic Energy Analysis Center at NREL from 2006 to 1010. Prior to joining NREL, he was a management consultant to clean energy companies, providing strategy, development and market counsel. Dr. Arent has a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and an MBA from Regis University.
Susan K. Avery took office as President and Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 2008. She holds a Master’s in Physics and a Doctorate in Atmospheric Science from the University of Illinois. Avery was on the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1982 to 2008, most recently holding the academic rank of Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research interests include studies of atmospheric circulation and precipitation, climate variability and water resources, and the development of new radar techniques and instruments for remote sensing. She also has a keen interest in scientific literacy and the role of science in public policy. She is the author or co-author of more than 80 peer-reviewed articles. A Fellow of CIRES since 1982, Avery became its Director in 1994. In that role, she facilitated new interdisciplinary research efforts spanning the geosciences and including the social and biological sciences. She spearheaded a reorganization of the institute and helped establish a thriving K-12 outreach program and a Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. She also worked with NOAA and the Climate Change Science Program to help formulate a national strategic science plan for climate research. Recently she served on two NRC panels: One produced a decadal plan for earth science and applications from space, and the other provided strategic guidance for the atmospheric sciences at the National Science Foundation. Avery is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Meteorological Society, for which she also served as President. She is a past chair of the board of trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Arrietta Chakos is a public policy advisor on urban resilience, working on community resilience strategies and multi-sectoral engagement. Her work with the Association of Bay Area Governments focuses on disaster and climate resilience planning with 101 cities and nine counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. The regional program focuses on development of common resilience policies and implementation measures sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative launched by the Rockefeller Foundation. She is a member of the Resilience Roundtable at the National Academy of Sciences and chairs the Housner Fellow committee at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. Ms. Chakos served as research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Acting in Time Advance Recovery Project. She worked extensively in local government to direct innovative risk mitigation initiatives,
intergovernmental coordination, and multi-institutional negotiations at the City of Berkeley, California.
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a leader in the field of conservation medicine and a respected disease ecologist. EcoHealth Alliance is a global organization dedicated to innovative conservation science linking ecology and the health of humans and wildlife. EcoHealth Alliance’s mission is to provide scientists and educators with support for grassroots conservation efforts in 20 high-biodiversity countries in North America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Nine years ago, Dr. Daszak became the Executive Director of EcoHealth Alliance’s Consortium for Conservation Medicine (CCM), a collaborative think-tank of institutions including Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, The University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine Center for Conservation Medicine, and the USGS National Wildlife Health Center. The CCM is the first formal inter-institutional partnership to link conservation and disease ecology. Dr. Daszak’s research has been instrumental in revealing and predicting the impacts of emerging diseases on wildlife, livestock, and human populations. He is originally from Britain, where he earned a B.Sc. in zoology and a Ph.D. in parasitology.
Thomas Dietz is Professor of Sociology, Environmental Science and Policy, and Animal Studies at Michigan State University, where he was founding director of the Environmental Science and Policy Program. His current research examines the human driving forces of environmental change, environmental values and the interplay between science and democracy in environmental issues. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been awarded the Sustainability Science Award of the Ecological Society of America, the Distinguished Contribution Award of the American Sociological Association Section on Environment, Technology and Society. He has served on numerous National Academies’ panels and committees and chaired the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change and the Panel on Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. He holds a Bachelor of General Studies degree from Kent State and a PhD in Ecology from the University of California at Davis.
Kristie L. Ebi is a Professor in the Department of Global Health and in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington; a Guest Professor at Umea University, Sweden; and Consulting Professor at Stanford University and George Washington University. She conducts research on the impacts of and adaptation to climate change, including on extreme events, thermal stress, foodborne safety and security, waterborne diseases, and vectorborne diseases. Her work focuses on understanding sources of vulnerability and designing adaptation policies and measures to reduce the risks of climate change in a multi-stressor environment. She has worked on assessing vulnerability and implementing adaptation measures in Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. She is co-chair with Tom Kram (PBL, The Netherlands) of the International Committee On New Integrated Climate change
assessment Scenarios (ICONICS), facilitating development of new climate change scenarios. She was Executive Director of the IPCC Working Group II Technical Support Unit from 2009 -2012. She was a coordinating lead author or lead author for the human health assessment for two U.S. national assessments, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development. Dr. Ebi’s scientific training includes an M.S. in toxicology and a Ph.D. and a Masters of Public Health in epidemiology, and postgraduate research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She edited fours books on aspects of climate change and published more than 150 papers.
Baruch Fischhoff (IOM) is Howard Heinz University Professor, in the Departments of Social and Decision Sciences and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where he heads the Decision Sciences major. A graduate of the Detroit Public Schools, he holds a BS in mathematics and psychology from Wayne State University and an MA and PhD in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and is a past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and of the Society for Risk Analysis. He chaired the Food and Drug Administration Risk Communication Advisory Committee and the National Research Council Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security. He has been a member of the Eugene, Oregon Commission on the Rights of Women, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and the Environmental Protection Agency Scientific Advisory Board, where he chaired the Homeland Security Advisory Committee. He has written or edited several books: Acceptable Risk (1981), A Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Prospects and Possibilities (1993), Preference Elicitation (1999), Risk Communication: The Mental Models Approach (2001), Intelligence Analysis: Behavioral and Social Science Foundations (2011), Risk: A Very Short Introduction (2011), Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User’s Guide (2011), Judgment and Decision Making (2011), Risk Analysis and Human Behavior (2011), and Counting Civilian Casualties (in press).
Nancy B. Grimm studies the interaction of climate variation and change, human activities, and ecosystems. Her long-term research focuses on how disturbances (such as flooding or drying) affect the structure and processes of desert streams, how chemical elements move through and cycle within both desert streams and cities, and how storm water infrastructure affects water and material movement across an urban landscape. A professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, Grimm is director of the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER program—an interdisciplinary study of urban social-ecological system sustainability by ecologists, engineers, physical and social scientists. She is co-director of a new Sustainability Research Network focused on resilience of cities and their infrastructure to weather-related extreme events (UREx SRN). She was president and is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a lead author for the 2nd and 3rd National Climate Assessments.
Henry D. Jacoby is the William F. Pounds professor of management (emeritus) in the Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work has focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy analysis in application to the threat of global climate change. Previously, he served on the faculties of the Department of Economics and the Kennedy School of Government, both at Harvard University. He has also served as director of the Harvard Environmental Systems Program, director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, associate director of the MIT Energy Laboratory, and chair of the MIT faculty. He has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Anthony Janetos is the director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a joint venture between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland. Prior to this position, he served as vice president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. Dr. Janetos also directed the center’s Global Change program. Before coming to The Heinz Center, he served as vice president for science and research at the World Resources Institute and senior scientist for the Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program in NASA’s Office of Earth Science. He was also program scientist for NASA’s Landsat 7 mission. He has had many years of experience in managing scientific research programs on a variety of ecological and environmental topics, including air pollution effects on forests, climate change impacts, land-use change, ecosystem modeling, and the global carbon cycle. He was a co-chair of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, and an author of the IPCC Special Report on Land-Use Change and Forestry, the Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Global Biodiversity Assessment. Dr. Janetos recently served on the NRC Committee for the Decadal Survey for Earth Sciences and Applications from Space, and has been a member of several other NRC Committees, including the NRC Committee for Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan, the Committee on Review of Scientific Research Programs at the Smithsonian Institution (2002), and the Committee on Ecological Indicators for the Nation.
Haroon S. Kheshgi is a Distinguished Research Associate at ExxonMobil’s Corporate Strategic Research. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Illinois (Urbana, B.S. 1978) and the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, Ph.D. 1983). He pursued research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1983-1986) before joining ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company in 1986. At ExxonMobil Corporate Strategic Research his research addresses many aspects of global climate change including carbon cycle, detection and attribution of climate change, paleoclimate implications, and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. He has contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as lead author, contributing author, and review editor in the IPCC’s last four assessment reports and its Special Reports on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, and on Land Use Change. Recent activities have include chairing IPIECA’s
Climate Change Working Group, the Society on Petroleum Engineering’s Committee on Carbon Capture and Storage, and the first Carbon Management Technologies Conference of the Engineering Founder Societies. He is currently an Associate Editor of the journal Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies for Global Change, and a member of AIChE’s Center for Energy Initiative Executive Committee, and has been member of the U.S. Carbon Cycles Science Steering Group, and NRC’s Climate Research Committee and Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.
Richard H. Moss is senior research scientist with the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland, visiting senior research scientist at the Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center, and senior fellow with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). He has served as director of the Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program/Climate Change Science Program (2000-06), vice president and managing director for Climate Change at WWF (2007-09), and senior director of the U.N. Foundation Energy and Climate Program (2006-2007). He also directed the Technical Support Unit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) impacts, adaptation, and mitigation working group (1993-1999) and served on the faculty of Princeton University (1989-91). He was a coordinating lead author of Confronting Climate Change and Realizing the Potential of Energy Efficiency, led preparation of the U.S. government’s 10-year climate change research plan, and has been a lead author and editor of a number of IPCC Assessments, Special Reports, and Technical Papers. Moss remains active in the IPCC and currently co-chairs the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis. He serves on the U.S. National Academy of Science’s standing committee on the “human dimensions” of global environmental change and the editorial board of Climatic Change. He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006, a Distinguished Associate of the U.S. Department of Energy in 2004, and a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program in 2001. He received an M.P.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University (Public and International Affairs) and his B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Moss’ research interests include development and use of scenarios, characterization and communication of uncertainty, and quantitative indicators of adaptive capacity and vulnerability to climate change.
Ian Roy Noble has spent 10 years with lead responsibility for the World Bank’s activities in adaptation to climate change. He has also worked with the Carbon Finance Unit on emissions reductions through reduced deforestation and forest degradation. Before coming to the Bank in 2002 he was Professor of Global Change Research at the Australian National University. He has had senior roles in the IPCC process and in international cooperative research on climate change as part of the IGBP (International Geosphere Biosphere Program) including chairing the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems for some years. An ecologist by training, he holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide, and his research interests cover animal behavior, vegetation and biodiversity management, ecosystem modeling, expert systems and the science-policy interface. In 1999 he was elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
Margo Oge served the United States Environmental Protection Agency for more than 30 years from 1980 to September 2012. She is widely recognized as having been a key architect of the EPA’s efforts to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. During her recent 18-year tenure as Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality, Ms. Oge led the EPA’s first ever national greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and heavy-duty trucks to double fuel efficiency by 2025, reduce GHG emissions by 50% and save consumers $1.7 trillion at the pump. In parallel, she also helped to establish the renewable fuels standard, which will significantly increase the volume of biofuels in our nation’s fuel supply. These new rules are viewed as some of the most significant steps forward in improving the sustainability of the U.S. transportation sector. Ms. Oge earned her Master’s Degree in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She also attended George Washington University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Kathleen Segerson is a Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. She was the Head of the Department of Economics from 2001 to 2005. Dr. Segerson specializes in natural resource economics, and in particular, the economics of environmental regulation. She is currently a member of both the Chartered Executive Board of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, and the Vice Chair of the Advisory Board’s Committee on Valuing the Protection of Ecological Services and Systems. She was a member of the U.S. General Accounting Office’s Expert Panel on Climate Change Economics from 2007 to 2008 and frequently serves on external review committees for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has also served on three National Research Council study committees: the Committee on Assessing and Valuing the Services of Aquatic and Related Terrestrial Ecosystems (2002-2004), the Committee on the Causes and Management of Coastal Eutrophication (1998-2000), and the Committee on Improving Principles and Guidelines for Waste Resources Planning by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2008- present). In 2008, she was named a Fellow by both the American Agricultural Economics Association and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. Dr. Segerson earned a PhD from Cornell University in 1984.
Kathleen J. Tierney is the Director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado. Dr. Tierney is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado. The Hazards Center is housed in the Institute of Behavioral Science, where Prof. Tierney holds a joint appointment. Dr. Tierney’s research focuses on the social dimensions of hazards and disasters, including natural, technological, and human-induced extreme events. With collaborators Michael Lindell and Ronald Perry, she recently published Facing the Unexpected: Disaster Preparedness and Response in the United States (Joseph Henry Press, 2001). This influential compilation presents a wealth of information derived from theory and research on disasters over the past 25 years. Among Dr. Tierney’s current and recent research projects are studies on the organizational response to the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center disaster, risk perception and risk
communication, the use of new technologies in disaster management, and the impacts of disasters on businesses.
Charles J. Vörösmarty is a Professor of Civil Engineering, a Distinguished Scientist with NOAA-Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center and Director of The City University of New York’s Environmental Crossroads Initiative at The City College of New York. His research focuses on the development of computer models and geospatial data sets used in synthesis studies of the interactions among the water cycle, climate, biogeochemistry and anthropogenic activities. His studies are built around local, regional and continental to global-scale modeling of water balance, discharge, constituent fluxes in river systems and the analysis of the impacts of large-scale water engineering on the terrestrial water cycle. He is a founding member of the Global Water System Project that represents the input of more than 200 international scientists under the International Council for Science’s Global Environmental Change Programs. He is spearheading efforts to develop global-scale indicators of water stress, to develop and apply databases of reservoir construction worldwide and to analyze coastal zone risks associated with water diversion. He recently won one of two national awards through the National Science Foundation to execute studies on hydrologic synthesis. Dr. Vörösmarty also is on several national and international panels, including the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, the NASA Earth Science Subcommittee, the National Research Council Committee on Hydrologic Science, the National Science Foundation’s Arctic System Science Program Committee and the Arctic HYDRA International Polar Year Planning Team. He also was on a National Research Council panel that reviewed NASA’s polar geophysical data sets, the decadal study on earth observations, and is Co-Chair of the National Science Foundation’s Arctic CHAMP hydrology initiative. He has assembled regional and continental-scale hydro-meteorological data compendia, including the largest single collection, Arctic-RIMS (covering northern Eurasia and North America).
