Michael Adams, is the president of the Environics group of research and communications consulting companies which he co-founded in 1970. He is the author of six books, including: Sex in the Snow: Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium (1997); Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, (2003); and Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism (2007). Fire and Ice won the prestigious 2003/04 Donner Prize for the best book on Canadian public policy and was selected in the fall of 2005 by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the 100 most important books ever published in the country. In his most recent book, Stayin’ Alive: How Canadian Baby Boomers Will Work, Play, and Find Meaning In the Second Half of Their Adult Lives (Penguin, November 2010), Michael reflects on the changes Baby Boomers have brought about in Canadian society—and the changes that are yet to come. In 2006, Michael founded the Environics Institute, a non-profit entity whose mission is to sponsor relevant and original public opinion, attitude and social values research related to issues of public policy and social change. To date, the Institute’s projects have included the first major survey of Canadian Muslims as well as the ambitious Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study (UAPS). Michael Adams holds an Honours B.A. in Political Science from Queen's University (1969) and a M.A. in Sociology from the University of Toronto (1970) and was named as one of the 100 most influential people in Canadian communications according to Marketing Magazine’s Power List 2005. In 2008 Michael Adams was appointed to the Ontario Premier’s Climate Change Advisory Panel and was made a Fellow of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association for his contribution to marketing and survey research in Canada. In the spring of 2009, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Ryerson University in Toronto.
Robert Atkinson is one of the country’s foremost thinkers on innovation economics. With an extensive background in technology policy, he has conducted ground-breaking research projects on technology and innovation, is a valued adviser to state and national policy makers, and a popular speaker on innovation policy nationally and internationally. He is the author of The Race for Global Innovation Advantage and Why the U.S. is Falling Behind (Yale, forthcoming) and The Past and Future of America’s Economy: Long Waves of Innovation That Power Cycles of Growth (Edward Elgar, 2005). Before ITIF, Atkinson was Vice President of the Progressive Policy Institute and Director of PPI’s Technology & New Economy Project. Ars Technica listed Atkinson as one of 2009’s Tech Policy People to Watch. He has testified before a number of committees in Congress and has appeared in various media outlets including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, and NBC Nightly News. He received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989.
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).
Stewart Brand is co-founder of Global Business Network and president of The Long Now Foundation. He created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog (National Book Award), and co-founded the Hackers Conference and The WELL. His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; and The Media Lab. His new book, titled Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary, is published by Viking in the U.S. and Atlantic in the UK. He graduated in Biology from Stanford and served as an Infantry officer.
Dalton Conley is currently Senior Vice Provost and Dean for the Social Sciences, as well as University Professor at New York University. He holds faculty appointments in NYU's Sociology Department, School of Medicine and the Wagner School of Public Service. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). 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 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. Among his other awards is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Conley holds a B.A. from the University of California – Berkeley, an M.P.A. & a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and an M.S. & M.Phil. in Biology from NYU. He is currently pursing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying phenotypic capacitance 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.
Audrey Kurth Cronin came to the U.S. National War College from Oxford University (Nuffield College), where she was Director of Studies for the Oxford/Leverhulme Program on the Changing Character of War. A member of the war college faculty in Washington, DC since July 2007, she also continues as a non-residential Senior Research Associate at Oxford. Before that, Dr. Cronin was Specialist in Terrorism at the U.S. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, where she advised Members in the aftermath of 9/11. She has taught at numerous other universities including Columbia, the University of Maryland and Georgetown, where her long-standing graduate course on terrorism was featured in the New York Times shortly after 9/11. In addition to her academic expertise, she has served periodically in the U.S. government, including positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. She regularly consults with agencies in both the Executive and Legislative branches.
Dr. Cronin completed the book How Terrorism Ends while on the faculty at Oxford. She also wrote Ending Terrorism: A Strategy for Defeating Al-Qaeda, a policy-oriented Adelphi Paper (monograph) published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in April 2008. She has a longstanding interest in the question of how conflicts end and wrote her first book on the negotiations over Austria following the Second World War (Great Power Politics and the Struggle over Austria, 1945-1955). Other recent publications include “How Al-Qaida Ends,” International Security (Summer 2006); “Cybermobilization: The New Levee en Masse,” Parameters (Summer 2006); “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism,” International Security (Winter 2002/2003); and “Rethinking Sovereignty: American Strategy in the Age of Terrorism,” Survival (Summer 2002). Major studies for Congress include Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (2004), and Al Qaeda after the Iraq Conflict (2003), and Terrorists and Suicide Attacks (2003). She also lately produced Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy (Georgetown University Press, 2004), an edited volume that examines the full range of policy instruments for effective counterterrorism.
Dr. Cronin graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where she captained the first women’s rowing team for St. Antony’s College.
Erle Ellis focuses on understanding the ecology of densely populated landscapes as they are transformed by population growth and industrially-based technologies. He is particularly concerned by the global and local environmental impacts of land use change and the very high nutrient inputs that are now used to sustain food security in the villages of developing countries. Recently, he has been conducting work across rural China as principal investigator of the project Long-Term Biogeochemical Changes in China's Anthropogenic Landscapes. He has also been investigating anthropogenic biomes, the global ecological patterns produced by human/environment interactions. His teaching includes Environmental Science & Conservation (120), Landscape Ecology (305), Applied Landscape Ecology (405/605), Biogeochemical Cycles in the Global Environment (412/612) and Field Methods in Geography (485/685).
Chris Foreman is professor and director of the social policy program at the University of Maryland 's School of Public Policy where he teaches courses on political institutions and the politics of inequality. Professor Foreman came to the school in 2000 after more than a decade at the Brookings Institution, where he continues as a non-resident senior fellow in the governance studies program. His book Signals from the Hill: Congressional Oversight and the Challenge of Social Regulation (Yale University Press, 1988) won the 1989 D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress. He is also the author of Plagues, Products and Politics: Emergent Public Health Hazards and National Policymaking (Brookings, 1994). In The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice (Brookings, 1998) Professor Foreman addresses the opportunities and constraints facing advocates and policymakers in the search for environmental equity. He is also the editor of The African American Predicament (Brookings, 1999). His interests include the politics of health, race, regulation, and government reform. Professor Foreman taught previously at American University . He served on the board of governors of The Nature Conservancy from 1999 to 2005, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Armenia in 2008-2009.
Karen J. Greenberg is the executive director of the Center on Law and Security. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days (Oxford University Press, 2009), which was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post and Slate.com. She is co-editor with Joshua L. Dratel of The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press, 2005), editor of the books The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Al Qaeda Now (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and editor of the NYU Review of Law and Security. Her work is featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles TimesThe San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The National Interest, Mother Jones, TomDispatch.com, and on major news channels. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Steven F. Hayward writes on a wide range of public policy issues. He is the author of the Almanac of Environmental Trends, and the author of many books on environmental topics. He has written biographies of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and of Winston Churchill. Mr. Hayward is also a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He contributes to AEI's Energy and Environment Outlook series. He recently co-authored the widely acclaimed report, “Post Partisan Power,” along with scholars from the Breakthrough Institute and the Brookings Institution.
Experience
Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1992-present
Member, California Departmental Transportation Advisory Committee, 1996-2001
Contributing Editor, Reason Magazine, 1990-2001
Bradley Fellow, 1997-98; Henry Salvatori Fellow, 1993-94, Heritage Foundation
Public Interest Member, California Citizens Compensation Commission, 1990-95
Director, Golden State Center for Policy Studies, 1987-91
Executive Director, Inland Business Magazine, 1985-90
Richard M. Weaver Fellow, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1985-86
Director of Journalism, Public Research Syndicated, Claremont Institute, 1984-87
Michael Lind is Policy Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program. He is a co-founder of the New America Foundation, along with Ted Halstead and Sherle Schwenninger, and was the first New America fellow. With Ted Halstead he is co-author of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Doubleday) and the author of the first New America Press book, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New America/Basic Books, 2003). Among his other nonfiction books are The American Way of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2006) and What Lincoln Believed (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has taught at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins and writes frequently for the Financial Times, the New York Times, Democracy Journal, and other publications. He has appeared on C-SPAN, National Public Radio, CNN, the Business News Network, the Newshour and other programs. He has a weekly column in Salon Magazine.
Mr. Lind’s first three books of political journalism and history, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (Free Press, 1995), Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (Free Press, 1996), and Vietnam: The Necessary War (Free Press, 1999) were all selected as New York Times Notable Books. He has also published several volumes of fiction and poetry, including The Alamo (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the Best Books of the year, and a prize-winning children’s book, Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt, 2004).
Michelle Marvier is a professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Santa Clara University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 and was a NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in 1997 & 1998. Michelle has worked for NOAA Fisheries on salmon conservation and has served as an advisor to the EPA, the USDA, and The Nature Conservancy on matters of statistics, monitoring, and risk analysis. Her efforts to apply evidence-based risk analysis to genetically engineered crops were funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She has published over 40 articles, currently serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and has served as the Executive Director of the Environmental Studies Institute and the Acting Associate Provost for Research Initiatives at Santa Clara University. Most recently, Michelle completed a new textbook, Conservation Science: Balancing the Needs of People and Nature, coauthored with Peter Kareiva.
Peter Kareiva is 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.
Matthew Nisbet, (Associate Professor, School of Communication)
Matthew Nisbet is a social scientist who studies, consults, and lectures on strategic communication in policymaking and public affairs. He is the author of more than 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and he serves on the editorial boards of Science Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics. Nisbet's research has appeared at high-impact disciplinary journals such as Public Opinion Quarterly, Public Understanding of Science, and Communication Research as well as interdisciplinary outlets such as Science, Environment, Nature Biotechnology, and BMC Public Health. His scholarship has been cited more than 500 times in the peer-reviewed literature and in more than 100 books. Nisbet's current research on climate change communication is funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where he serves as a Health Policy Investigator. He has also worked as a consultant to several leading organizations. His popular writing has appeared at outlets such as the Columbia Journalism Review, the Washington Post, and Slate magazine.
Degrees
A.B. Dartmouth College (Government); M.S. Cornell University (Communication); Ph.D. Cornell University (Communication)
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, 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).
Steve Rayner is Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, from where he also directs the Oxford Programme on the Future of Cities. He is also a Professorial Fellow of Keble College, Oxford and Honorary Professor of Climate Change and Society at the University of Copenhagen. Before coming to the University of Oxford in 2002, Steve Rayner was Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He held simultaneous appointments as Professor of Environment and Public Affairs, Professor of Sociology, and as the Chief Social Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction. Prior to that, he held the rank of Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Located in the Washington DC office, he led the Global Change Research Group from 1991 to 1996. Previously, he was Deputy Director of the Global Environmental Studies Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he was responsible for research in Policy, Energy, and Human Systems. Rayner has been a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is editor (with Elizabeth Malone) of Human Choice and Climate Change: An International Assessment. These 4 volumes (published in February 1998) bring together almost one hundred authors and contributors from all parts of the world. He was a member of the DOE Multi-Laboratory Climate Change Committee that produced the book Energy and Climate Change. He has testified before US Congressional Committees on US policy regarding global change research and UK Parliamentary Committees on climate policy. He was also lead author and contributor to various Reports to the US Congress on climate change policy and implementation. Altogether, he is co-author or editor of 8 books, 3 special issues of journals, more than 50 articles and papers, and 20 technical reports covering a broad field including social and market impacts of technologies, technology acceptance, risk management, global and local environmental impacts and policy, economic recovery and development, land use, energy policy, industrial ecology, and public engagement with science. He is the coauthor of a number of controversial articles on climate change policy including Zen and the Art of Carbon Cycle Maintenance, Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation and Time to Ditch Kyoto, all published in the journal Nature. He has made numerous presentations on the issues of risk management, global change, and sustainable development to industry, academia, and government. He has taught at Virginia Tech, Cornell University, the University of Tennessee, the US Office of Personnel Management's Executive Seminar Center, and the University of London. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and Boston University School of Public Health. He has received several awards, including the 25th Annual Homer N. Calver Award from the Environment Section of the American Public Health Association, the PNNL Laboratory Director’s Award for R&D Excellence, and two Martin-Marietta Energy Systems Awards for ground breaking work in risk analysis and global climate change policy analysis respectively. He is a Member of the Cosmos Club in Washington DC and has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Society of Arts, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Mark Sagoff has published widely in journals of law, philosophy, and the environ¬ment. His most recent books are The Economy of the Earth, 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Price, Principle, and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He was named a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 and awarded a Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1998. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Hastings Center. Sagoff has an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. (Philosophy) from Rochester, and taught at Princeton, the Uni¬ver¬sity of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and Cornell before going to the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was Director and Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy for many years. In 2011, Sagoff became director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public policy and a professor of Philosophy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
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 exploring 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 as a staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. 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. His latest book is the Techno-Human Condition (MIT Press; co-authored with Braden Allenby). He is also a regular columnist for Nature magazine.
Michael Shellenberger (moderator) is is president and co-founder of Breakthrough Institute. He is co-author with Ted Nordhaus of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin 2007). Time magazine called Break Through "prescient" for its prediction that pollution regulations could not transform the global energy economy, and Wired magazine said the book "could be the most important thing to happen to environmentalism since Silent Spring." The book received the 2007 Green Book Award and a starred review from Publishers' Weekly, which called the book "Convincing, resonant, and hopeful." In 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus generated a national debate in the pages of the New York Times and around the country when they published "The Death of Environmentalism," which argued against apocalyptic climate rhetoric and the regulation-centered policy approach in favor of an aspirational discourse and an investment and innovation-focused agenda. For their work, Shellenberger and Nordhaus were named Time magazine "Heroes of the Environment 2008". Breakthrough Institute's strategy to "Make Clean Energy Cheap" was the recent subject of a profile on NPR's "Morning Edition." In 2002, Michael co-founded the Apollo Alliance. Michael has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the American Prospect, Salon, Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy, Glamour Magazine and other publications.
Ted Nordhaus (moderator) is an author, researcher, and political strategist. He is a widely recognized authority on climate and energy policy and his work has deeply influenced a new generation of clean energy advocates. With co-author Michael Shellenberger, he published the seminal essay "The Death of Environmentalism" in 2004 and the controversial and critically acclaimed Break Through, Why We Can't Leave Saving The Planet To Environmentalists in 2007. Time Magazine named Ted a "Hero of the Environment" in 2008, and dubbed his work "prescient." His writings have appeared widely in magazines, newspapers, and journals including The New Republic, The American Prospect, Salon, and The New York Times among many others. Ted is a founder and chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, a political think tank based in Oakland, California that works at the nexus of climate, energy, and economic policy. He is also managing partner of American Environics, a research and consulting firm that brings cutting edge research and methodologies used to understand the evolution of American social values to progressive political projects.