Scientific Advisory Panel

Thomas Lovejoy, PhD
Honorary Co-Chair of the Climate Recovery Partnership
and Scientific Advisory Panel Chair
Pioneering conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy holds the Biodiversity Chair at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. In addition to scientific leadership roles at the World Bank and United Nations, Lovejoy founded the PBS series Nature. In 2008, he was named honorary co-chair of the Climate Recovery Partnership and Science Advisory Panel chair.

Christopher Field, PhD
Christopher Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and faculty director of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Field's research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale. In September 2008, he was elected co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is leading the next assessment on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.

Lara Hansen, PhD
Lara Hansen is the Chief Scientist and Executive Director of EcoAdapt, an organization created to help develop the field of climate change adaptation by creating a network to develop the science of adaptation, build capacity to expand the field, and provide technical support to agencies and organizations that want to start implementing adaptation. Her work focuses on identifying impacts of climate change and developing strategies to increase ecosystem and natural resource resilience to better weather the effects of climate change.

Gregory Kats
Gregory Kats is the director of climate change policy and a senior director at Good Energies, a global private investor in clean-energy technologies. He leads Good Energies' investments in energy efficiency and green buildings. Kats is also a founder of the American Council on Renewable Energy, and the New Resource Bank. He is founding chair of the Energy and Atmosphere Technical Advisory Group for LEED, and was the principal advisor in developing Green Communities, the national green affordable-housing design standard.

Rattan Lal, PhD
Rattan Lal is a professor of soil physics at the School of Environment and Natural Resources, and director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University. Since joining OSU in 1987, he has worked on soils and climate change, drainage of agricultural lands, soil degradation, and global food security. Lal was a member of the U.S. National Committee on Soil Science of the National Academy of Sciences (1998-2002), lead author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1998-2000), and was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize certificate.

Edward Miles, PhD
Edward Miles is a Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Marine & Public Affairs; Senior Fellow, Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Oceans; and co-director of the Center for Science in the Earth System at the University of Washington. He is also a trustee at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment.

Camille Parmesan, PhD
Camille Parmesan is an associate professor in Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on the current impacts of climate change on wildlife, from field-based work on American and European butterflies to synthetic analyses of global impacts on a broad range of species across terrestrial and marine biomes. She works actively with governmental agencies (e.g. USFWS) and non-governmental organizations (e.g. WWF, IUCN, TNC) to develop conservation assessment and planning tools aimed at preserving biodiversity in the face of climate change. She has authored and reviewed for multiple reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Benjamin Santer, PhD
Benjamin Santer is an atmospheric scientist with the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is one of the world's leading scientists in the identification of human-caused climate change. Santer has been a key contributor to all four Scientific Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

David Tilman, PhD
David Tilman is a Regents' Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, and is director of the University's Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. His research focuses on the causes, consequences, and conservation of earth's biodiversity, and on how managed and natural ecosystems can sustainably meet human needs for food, energy, and ecosystem services. Tilman is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, was the founding editor of the journal Ecological Issues, and has served on editorial boards of nine scholarly journals, including Science.