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BISO Home > USNMO/IIASA Homepage > USNMO/IIASA Committee Member Biographies

USNMO/IIASA COMMITTEE MEMBER BIOGRAPHIES

Chair
Simon Levin is a George M. Moffett Professor of Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and the director of the Center of Biocomplexity. Dr. Levin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His principal research interest is in understanding how macroscopic patterns and processes are maintained at the level of ecosystems and the biosphere, in terms of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that operate primarily at the level of organisms. His work integrates empirical studies and mathematical modeling, with emphasis upon how to extrapolate across scales of space, time, and organizational complexity. Dr. Levin received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Vice Chair
Donald Saari is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Saari received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University in 1967. His research interests include dynamical systems and their application to the physical and social sciences. He is especially interested in voting, social choice, and decision theory; evolutionary game theory and applications to the social sciences; and dynamical systems and celestial mechanics. Dr. Saari is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Members

Dan Arvizu is the Director and Chief Executive of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). NREL, in Golden, Colorado, began operations in 1977 and is the DOE's primary laboratory for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance). Dr. Arvizu is President of Alliance and also is an Executive Vice President with the Midwest Research Institute, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. After more than three decades of professional engagement in the clean energy field, Dr. Arvizu has become one of the world's leading experts on renewable energy and sustainable energy. He frequently engages with national leaders in Congress, the Administration, academia, non-governmental organizations, and industry. As NREL's Director, Dr. Arvizu has established and implemented a new institutional strategy to position the lab for higher impact and contributions to national energy challenges. In the past five years, Dr. Arvizu has overseen an increase of more than fifty percent in the lab's operating budget, overseen a doubling of Lab technical staff, and has helped attract over four hundred million dollars for new infrastructure. Prior to joining NREL, Dr. Arvizu was the chief technology officer with CH2M HILL Companies, Ltd. Before joining CH2M, Dr. Arvizu was an executive with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Dr. Arvizu started his career and spent four years at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories. Dr. Arvizu has a BS degree in mechanical engineering from New Mexico State University and a MS degree and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Roberta Balstad is a Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University and Director of the University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). Dr. Balstad has published extensively on science policy, information technology and scientific research, remote sensing applications and policy, and the role of the social sciences in understanding global environmental change. She was appointed senior fellow at Oxford University in 1991-1992 and a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1994. She was previously the Director of the Division of Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation, the founder and first Executive Director of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), and President/CEO of CIESIN prior to its joining Columbia University. She has lectured widely, both in the United States and abroad. From 1992 to 1994, she was Vice President of the International Social Science Council and has also served as chair of the NRC Steering Committee on Space Applications and Commercialization, the NATO Advisory Panel on Advanced Scientific Workshops/Advanced Research Institutes, the AAAS Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy, and the Advisory Committee of the Luxembourg Income Study. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the OpenGIS Consortium and the Advisory Board of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (South Africa). Dr. Balstad is currently Chair of the USNC/CODATA.

Scott Barrett is a Professor of Environmental Economics and International Political Economy and Director of the Energy, Environment, Science and Technology Program at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Barrett received his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics. His thesis was awarded the Resources for the Future Dissertation Prize. His areas of interest include conflict resolution and negotiation; economics; energy and environment issues; air pollution, global climate change, and nuclear waste; and international political economy. Dr. Barrett is an international research fellow with the Kiel Institute of World Economics; former faculty member at the University of London; recipient of Erik Kempe Prize for work on the strategy of negotiating international environmental agreements; adviser to international organizations—including the European Commission, IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), various U.N. agencies, and the World Bank—on negotiating environmental treaties; and served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Nancy Birdsall is President of the Center for Global Development. From 1993 to 1998, she was executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before that she worked 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, including as director of the Policy Research Department.
She is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and over 100 articles in scholarly journals and monographs. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and her M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to launching the Center, she served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where her work focused on globalization, inequality and the reform of the international financial institutions.

Robert Corell is a Senior Policy Fellow with the Atmospheric Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a Senior Research Fellow in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Prior to joining the AMS in January 2000, Dr. Corell was Assistant Director for Geosciences at the National Science Foundation, where he had oversight of the Atmospheric, Earth, and Ocean Sciences and the global change programs of the NSF. While at the NSF, he also served as the Chair of the committee of the National Science and Technology that has oversight of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. He has served as Chair and principal U.S. delegate to many international bodies with interests in, and responsibilities for, climate and global change research programs. Before joining the NSF, he was a Professor and academic administrator at the University of New Hampshire. A native of Detroit, Corell is an oceanographer and engineer by background and training, having received Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. degrees at the Case Institute of Technology and MIT. He has held appointments at the Woods Hole Institution of Oceanography, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the University of Washington. He is a recipient of the AMS Special Award and the AGU’s Edward A. Flinn III Award.

Eduardo Feller has served at the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1972 in several capacities, most recently as Senior Associate in the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) from 1987 until his retirement in September 2008.  At OISE, he worked on new program initiatives including the creation of the Interamerican Institute for Global Change Research, the Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes Program, and programs of Science and Technology at the Organization of American States. Other duties at NSF included serving at the Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) as Executive Secretary of the U.S.-Brazil Science and Technology Blue Ribbon Commission, heading the Industrial Countries Section in the Office of International Programs, which encompassed all OECD countries, representing NSF at the Palmer Research Station in Antarctica, and serving as Program Manager of the Latin American and Spain Cooperative Science Programs.  Since 2003, he has overseen the renewal of NSF support for the NAS as IIASA’s U.S. National Member Organization.  Dr. Feller studied engineering at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, in La Paz, Bolivia; then obtained a B.S. in Government at Ohio University; and a M.A. in Government and International Affairs at Ohio University, followed by an M.A. and a Ph.D. in International Studies at the University of Denver. He also attended Harvard University as a Senior Executive Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Robert Frosch is a Senior Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He serves as a participant and advisor on the Global Environmental Assessment and Sustainability Systems projects, and participates in the Managing the Atom and Energy seminars. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Report Review Committee of the National Academies, and as a frequent Reviewer and Monitor of National Academies reports. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Theoretical Physics. He conducted research in ocean acoustics at Columbia and later served as Director for Nuclear Test Detection and Deputy Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Department of Defense, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development (ASNR&D), Assistant Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Associate Director for Applied Oceanography of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), President of the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES), and Vice President of General Motors Corporation (GM) in charge of Research Laboratories. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Member of the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering, and a fellow or member of a number of professional societies.

L. Robin Keller is a Professor of Operations and Decision Technologies at the University of California at Irvine.  An expert in decision analysis, risk analysis, creative problem structuring and behavioral decision theory, Dr. Keller has served as a program director for the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. In her research, she studies ways to creatively structure decision problems and analyzes models of perceived risk and of the fairness of the distribution of risks among groups. Professor Keller has published articles in such noteworthy journals as Management Science, Risk Analysis, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Theory and Decision and Medical Decision Making. Dr. Keller served as the Vice President-Finance of the Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and served as Chair of its Investment Committee. She was also a founding Director-at-large of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), which was formed by the merger of TIMS and the Operations Research Society of America. In addition, she served as Associate Dean for Research of GSM in 1992-93. Dr. Keller received her Ph.D. and M.B.A. from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been on the UCI faculty since 1982, and has been a visiting professor at Duke and UCLA.

Barbara Lee Keyfitz joined the Department of Mathematics at The Ohio State University, in January 2009, after 25 years at the University of Houston. From July 2004 until December 2008 she was Director of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto, Canada.  Dr. Keyfitz has made profound and original contributions to the field of applied mathematics, particularly in the study of nonlinear partial differential equations and of fluid flow and transonic shock waves.  She has studied systems of conservation laws which are nonstrictly hyperbolic or which change type from hyperbolic to elliptic in steady or unsteady flow. Recently, Dr. Keyfitz has been working on extensions of earlier multidimensional work.  This background gives her particular insight into the advanced mathematical modeling that underlies much of IIASA’s work, and will ensure that the Institute’s modeling capabilities remain on the cutting edge of the field. She has served on the editorial boards of many journals, and has been active in many different capacities in the American Mathematical Society, NSF, and NSERC.  She was awarded the Canadian Mathematical Society’s 2005 Krieger-Nelson Prize, and was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics.  She is treasurer of the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She received her Ph.D. from New York University's Courant Institute in 1970.

Charles Kolstad is the Donald Bren Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is jointly appointed in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and the Department of Economics. At UCSB he leads the NSF-funded Ph.D. program in Economics and Environmental Science. For the decade prior to joining UCSB in 1993, he was on the faculty of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He has been a visiting professor at MIT, Stanford, the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and the New Economic School (Moscow). He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1982. Prof. Kolstad has contributed broadly to environmental economics, though most of his research has been in the area of environmental regulation. He is particularly interested in the role of information in environmental decision-making and regulation. His past work in energy markets has focused on coal and electricity markets, including the effect of air pollution regulation on these markets. During 2001-2002, Prof. Kolstad was president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE). He has served on numerous other advisory boards, including the USEPA Science Advisory Board’s Clean Air Act Compliance Analysis Committee and Environmental Economics Advisory Committee. He has also served on a number of National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences committees, including the Committee to Review CAFE Standards for Automobile Fuel Efficiency and, currently, the Committee to Review the President’s Climate Change Research Program.

Steve Murawski holds the Peter Betzer Chair of Biological Oceanography at the University of South Florida.  Until January 2011, he was the Director of Scientific Programs and Chief Science Advisor of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOSS). Dr. Murawski is a fisheries biologist and marine ecologist involved in understanding the impacts of human activities on the sustainability of ocean ecosystems. He has developed approaches for understanding the impacts of fishing on marine fish complexes exploited in mixed-species aggregations. Additionally, his work on impacts of marine protected areas and other management options has formed the scientific basis for regulation. As a co-founder of the CAMEO (Comparative Analysis of Marine Ecosystem Organization) program – a jointly funded program among NOAA Fisheries and the National Science Foundation - he has supported analyses of marine ecosystems throughout the nation. His current areas of interest include understanding the Gulf of Mexico Large Marine Ecosystem in terms of multiple, simultaneous stressors through the application of integrated ecosystem assessments. Such assessments can help inform investments to rebuild the Gulf of Mexico from effects of the oil spill, loss of juvenile nursery areas, nutrient enrichment, overfishing and other factors. Additionally, he is working on applying advanced technology solutions to the next generation of marine ecosystem surveys. In addition to his science activities, Dr. Murawski is a US delegate and current vice-president of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), a 20-nation organization dedicated to increasing understanding of ocean ecosystems in the convention area, which includes the United States, Canada and 18 European countries.

Brian O’Neill is a Scientist in the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) at NCAR.  Prior to moving to Boulder, he led the Population and Climate Change (PCC) Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He holds a Ph.D. in Earth Systems Science and an M.S. in Applied Science, both from New York University.  Dr. O’Neill’s research interests are in the field of integrated assessment modeling of climate change, which links socio-economic and natural science elements of the climate change issue in order to address applied, policy-relevant questions. Particular areas of focus include the relationship between demographic change and greenhouse gas emissions, the characterization of uncertainty and its role in decision analysis, and scenario analyses linking long-term climate change goals to shorter-term actions.  He has worked as a member of the science staff of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, and as an Assistant and Associate Professor (Research) at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. In 2004, he received a European Young Investigator (EURYI) award which provides principal funding for the PCC Program at IIASA. He has published in a variety of journals, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – USA, and Population and Development Review. He has also served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report in a volume on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability (Working Group II), and for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in a volume on Scenarios.

Margaret Palmer is Professor and Director of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. She (is an expert on watershed science and restoration ecology) has worked on streams, rivers, and estuaries for 27 years, and has led scientific projects at national and international levels. She has more than 150 scientific publications, serves as an editor for the journal Restoration Ecology, and co-authored the book The Foundations of Restoration Ecology. Dr. Palmer has been honored as a AAAS Fellow, an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Lilly Fellow, a Distinguished Scholar Teacher, and with an Ecological Society of America Distinguished Service Award. Her current research is concentrated on: 1) evaluating stream ecosystem functions in Coastal Plain lowlands of Maryland and restoration effectiveness; 2) evaluating the potential for stream restoration to enhance nitrogen removal in Chesapeake Bay tributaries; 3) investigating climate change impacts on rivers and adaptation options, including models and empirical work on the interactive effects of land use change and climate change on stream ecosystem services. 4) studying effects of land use change on stream ecosystems; 5) synthesizing the scientific status of riverine restoration nationally (NRRSS project); 6) theory and experimentation in restoration and 7) investigating how urbanizing landscapes influence stream fauna and ecosystem processes through changes in the riparian zone, the hydrology, and channel characteristics. Dr. Palmer co-teaches a week-long summer short course focusing on the fundamental ecological, hydrologic, and geomorphic principles underlying effective stream restoration.

Barbara Boyle Torrey is a Guest Researcher at the National Institute of Aging of NIH.  She served as the executive director of the Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academy of Sciences from 1993-2002, and was a visiting scholar at the Population Research Bureau from 2002-2010, researching a series of topics on the interaction of social policy and population changes.  An economist-demographer with a special interest in children and the elderly, she is well known for her social policy research across a broad range of topics. She served on the IIASA Science Advisory Committee from 2002 through 2010.

Kenneth W. Wachter (NAS) is Chair of the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley.  He received the Mindel Sheps Award in 1988 from the Population Association of America and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1997.  He has also served on the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council, on the special advisory panel on 1990 Census Adjustment for the U.S. Department of Commerce, and on the National Science Foundation’s Panel on Measurement Methods and Data Resources.  Dr. Wachter previously taught at Harvard University and has published numerous articles and books on historical demography, statistical methods, nutrition, aging, and kinship models.  He holds a masters degree in Applied Mathematics from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Cambridge University.  He has previously served the National Academy of Sciences as a member of the Panel on Immigration Statistics, the Committee on National Statistics, and as co-chair of the Workshops on Biodemography.

Richard Zeckhauser is the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Zeckhauser pursues a mix of conceptual and applied research. The primary challenge facing society, he believes, is to allocate resources in accordance with the preferences of the citizenry. Much of his conceptual work examines possibilities for democratic, decentralized allocation procedures. His ongoing policy investigations explore ways to promote the health of human beings, to help labor and financial markets operate more efficiently, and to foster informed and appropriate choices by individuals and government agencies. He serves as a Trustee for The Commonwealth School and as a member of NBER, the Russell Sage Roundtable in Behavioral Economics, the Academic Advisory Committee, American Enterprise Institute, and the OECD High Level Advisory Board on Large-Scale Catastrophes. His latest book, with Peter Schuck, is entitled Targeting in Social Programs: Avoiding Bad Bets and Removing Bad Apples. His forthcoming book, with Jonathan Nelson, is The Patron's Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Renaissance Italy. He holds a BA summa cum laude and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ex-Officio Members
Norman P. Neureiter is an ex-officio member of the committee by virtue of his service as a trustee to IIASA's newly established endowment fund (IEF). Dr. Neureiter was appointed Director of the new Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004. Dr. Neureiter was a Fulbright Fellow to Germany from 1955 to 1956 and earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Northwestern University in 1957. After joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1965, during the height of the Cold War, he became the first U.S. science attaché in Eastern Europe in 1967, based at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, Poland. From 1969 to 1973, he served as the international affairs assistant in President Richard Nixon's Office of Science and Technology. After leaving that post, he worked for Texas Instruments until 1996, serving in his last years there as Director of Texas Instruments in Japan and the Vice President of Texas Instruments Asia. In the closing months of the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was named to a three-year term as science and technology adviser to the Secretary of State, serving first under Secretary Madeleine Albright and then, after President George W. Bush took office, under Secretary Colin Powell. Neureiter left the post in September 2003, after his term expired.

Roger Levien is the founder of Strategy & Innovation Consulting, a consultancy established to provide support to senior managers in developing longer-term strategic direction and strengthening innovation. His consultancy draws upon extensive experience at the Xerox Corporation and in public policy research organizations. In addition to Xerox, he has worked to design, execute, and implement strategic renewal and technology evaluation processes with the senior management teams of a number of other corporations, including Cooper Tire and Rubber, Cooper-Standard Automotive, Sonoco Products Company, FMC Technologies, and Blackboard, Inc. and with non-commercial organizations, such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. From January 1982 through May 1997, he held senior positions at the Xerox Corporation in business and technology strategy. As a Corporate Vice President, he had responsibility for Corporate Strategy and, within Corporate Research and Technology, for Technology and Market Development and for Strategy and Innovation.  He is the author of Taking Technology to Market (Crisp Publications, 1997). From 1974 through December 1981, Dr. Levien was Director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The Austrian Government awarded him the Ehrenkreuz First Class for his service. From 1960 through August 1974, he was on the staff of The RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California and Washington, DC. During that time Dr. Levien was Deputy Vice President for RAND’s Domestic Program, Head of its Washington Office Domestic Programs, the Education Program, and the System Sciences Department. While at RAND he co-authored two books: The Emerging Technology (McGraw-Hill) and Research and Development Management (Lexington Books). From 1969 through 1974 he was also Adjunct Professor of System Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Levien chaired a National Research Council Study Panel on the Future of Internet Navigation and the Domain Name System, whose report, Signposts in Cyberspace, was published in July 2005 by the National Academies Press. He has served on the board of Brown and Sharpe - a NYSE company, the Research Advisory Council of the Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, the board of the National Corporate Theatre Fund, and the board of the Connecticut Grand Opera and Orchestra. He has also been chairman of the Engineering Council of Swarthmore College and of the strategic planning panels of the Conference Board and of MAPI.  Dr. Levien holds the Ph.D. and MS in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University and a BS in Engineering (with Highest Honors) from Swarthmore College. He has been elected to membership in the Connecticut Academy of Science and Technology, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi.

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