Speakers
Stanley H. Ambrose
Stanley H. Ambrose is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. He began his archaeological research career in Africa studying the influence of middle Holocene aridity on the spread of agriculture to East Africa. His current research focuses on the archaeology of modern human origins in East Africa, with a particular focus on the relationship between climate change, and the evolution of social cooperation at the beginning of the last ice age. He directs the Environmental Isotope Paleobiogeochemistry Laboratory, and uses stable isotope analysis of soils, bones, teeth, plants and pottery residues to reconstruct ancient diets and climates of early hominids spanning the last 14 million years in East Africa and India. His research on the Volcanic Winter hypothesis for the recent human genetic bottleneck has been the subject of recent television documentaries in the History Channel MegaDisasters and the National Geographic Naked Science programs.
Donna Cox
Donna J. Cox is Professor in School of Art and Design, Director of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the NCSA at UIUC. She is the first Michael Aiken Chair, and Director of Illinois eDREAM Institute. She is a recognized pioneer in the art of scientific visualization bringing science to the public through innovative, inspiring, and artistic presentations. Leonardo awarded Cox the international Coler-Maxwell Award for Excellence. Chicago Museum of Science and Industry selected her as one of 40 modern Leonardo DaVinci’s. She was Art Director and Producer for Scientific Visualization for the IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage," nominated for 1997 Academy Award. She and her collaborators have thrilled millions of people with visualizations for PBS HD television and digital shows at Museums around the world.
Peter B. deMenocal
Peter B. deMenocal is a Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. At Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University he uses stable isotopic and other geochemical analyses of marine sediments to understand how and why past climates have changed, with a specific interest in placing contemporary climate change trends within the context of climate changes during the prehistoric past. Current areas of research include: stability of warm climate periods, African monsoonal climate, ancient cultural responses to rapid climate change, and the role of climate change in evolution of early human ancestors. He was awarded the Lenfest Columbia Distinguished Faculty award in 2008 and is an Editor of the scientific journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. He has a B.S. in geology from St. Lawrence University (cum laude), an M.S. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of Oceanography, and a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University. He will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by St Lawrence University in 2009.
Calvin B. DeWitt
Calvin B. DeWitt's research interests include integrative framing of science, ethics, and praxis in the development and application of solutions to environmental issues and problems; wetland ecosystem development and role in sequestering carbon and atmospheric solutes and particulates in maintaining a habitable earth; limnogeology; groundwater systems and stewardship in relation to wetlands, lakes, and municipal high-capacity wells policy; thermoregulatory systems and energy exchange across the span of individual organisms to biospheric processes; administration, land stewardship, and micro cogeneration of electric and thermal energy at local governmental levels; interfacing of ethical, religious, economic, and governmental systems toward long-term health and sustainability of the biosphere; identifying and addressing the root causes of unsustainability; soil stewardship and agricultural ecology, ethical motivations for landscape preservation in the lives of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt; and application of ecosystem services and systems analysis to ecological and societal sustainability.
In addition to being Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, Calvin DeWitt is one of the most prominent thinkers at the intersection of evangelicalism and environmentalism. His numerous accomplishments include these: Co-Founder of the International Evangelical Environmental Network; Founding Director and President Emeritus of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies; Co-founder, International Evangelical Environmental Network; Founding member and chair, American Society of the Green Cross; and Chair of the Advisory Council, Evangelical Campaign to Combat Global Warming and Climate Change.
Brian Fagan
Brian Fagan studied archaeology at Cambridge University and spent his early career as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia. There, he excavated early farming villages and worked on multidisciplinary African history. From 1967 to 2003, he was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is now Emeritus. A former Guggenheim Fellow, his many general books on the past include The Rape of the Nile, The Adventure of Archaeology, and four books on ancient climate change and human society, the latest being The Great Warming. He is currently working on ancient water management.
Dan Ferber
Dan Ferber is the coauthor, with Paul Epstein, MD, of Harvard Medical School, of Changing Planet, Changing Health (Union Square Press, 2009), which will cover the impacts of climate change on public health. To research the book, he visited a malaria-prone village in central Kenya; urban slums outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where people are still rebuilding from Hurricane Mitch, and Harlem, where air pollution from fossil fuels aggravates asthma in hundreds of children. He is a contributing correspondent for the journal Science, and his award-winning journalism has appeared in Reader's Digest, Popular Science, New Scientist, Audubon, Nature Conservancy magazine, Women's Health and many other publications.
James Rodger Fleming
James Rodger Fleming (Ph.D. Princeton) is a historian of science and technology at Colby College. Books include Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (1998), Intimate Universality (2006), The Callendar Effect (2007), and his latest, Fixing the Sky, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Awards and honors include election as a Fellow of the AAAS; major grants from NEH and NSF; and visiting appointments at MIT, Harvard, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He was an invited contributing author for the AR4 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Jan Golinski
Jan Golinski is Professor of History and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire; and Dibner Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, for 2008-2009. He is the author of: Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (new edition, University of Chicago Press, 2005); and British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2007). While at The Huntington, he is working on a project entitled: “The Making of the Man of Science: Identity, Sociability, and Gender in the British Enlightenment.”
Michael Hawthorne
Michael Hawthorne is the environment reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He has written extensively about the nation's lingering pollution problems, including threats posed by mercury-contaminated fish, toxic chemicals plaguing the Great Lakes and emerging contaminants in the environment. Hawthorne previously worked as the environment reporter for The Columbus Dispatch and as a state government reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer and The News-Gazette of Champaign, Ill. He began his journalism career as a reporter for The News-Journal of Daytona Beach, Fla. A graduate of Bradley University, Hawthorne received a master's degree in public affairs reporting from Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Hee Yun Kim
Hee Yun Kim’s music has rich imagination, colorful orchestration and dramatic energy of musical lines. Recently, her piece Memoir of Dong-Hak for quintet was awarded a prestigious prize, the 2007 Pablo Casals Festival International Composition Competition, performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and broadcast by the Radio France. She also attended the National Arts Centre Young Composers Programme in Canada as the first international participant, which was directed by Pinchas Zukerman and broadcast by the CBC Radio.
Her compositions have been performed in many cities in the U.S., Europe and Asia including New York, Boston, Ottawa, Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, Krakow and Seoul, and performed by prominent ensembles including the New York New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Calliopée in Paris, l’Orchestre de la Francophonie Canadienne in Montréal, Composers Ensemble of Northern New York, ALEA III in Boston, HET Trio in the Netherlands, and in workshops with the Kronos Quartet and soprano Dawn Upshaw. She also won the Tokyo International Composition Competition Second Prize, the Composers Ensemble of Northern New York Competition, the Dong-A Music Competition, the University of Illinois Symphony Orchestra Commission, and the ALEA III International Composition Competition Finalist. She received her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from Seoul National University in Korea, and her doctoral degrees from Krakow Music Academy in Poland and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, she is a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Stephanie LeMenager
Stephanie LeMenager is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she serves as Director of the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center. The Center is currently leading a multi-departmental research project titled “Imagining Global Ecologies.” Professor LeMenager is working on a book about how global weather, water, and energy systems affected the imaginative possibilities and formal experiments of nineteenth and twentieth-century US literature. Her first book, Manifest and Other Destinies, won the 2005 Thomas J. Lyon Award for Best Book in Western American Literary Studies.
Eugene Linden
Eugene Linden has spent his career writing humanity’s relationship with nature in books, articles and essays, and is the winner of numerous journalistic awards including the American Geophysical Union’s Walter Sullivan Award. His most recent book is Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, which won the 2007 Grantham Prize Special Award of Merit. Currently he is working on The Ragged Edge of the World, a book about his various travels to that moveable frontier with wildlands, indigenous peoples, and modernity collide.
Stephen Long
Steve Long is Professor and Director of the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of llinois.. The Institute won $500M, supporting the development of environmentally and economically sustainable biofuels. He has pioneered experiments which directly assess the effects of atmospheric change on food crop production. In parallel for the last 25 years he has researched novel high-yielding low input bioenergy crops, suitable for marginal lands; in Europe and the USA. His work shows that one crop, Miscanthus, has the potential to replace renewably most of our gasoline use. He is one of the 250 most cited authors in Biology, among the 20 most cited on Climate Change and a Fellow of the AAAS. Last year he briefed President Bush at the White House on opportunities for mitigation through bioenergy He is scheduled to speak at the Vatican next year.
Lisa J. Lucero
Lisa J. Lucero is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Her interests focus on the emergence and demise of political power, ritual, water management, climate change and civilization, and the Classic Maya. She has been conducting research in Belize for 20 years. Recent publications include Water and Ritual: The Rise and Fall of Classic Maya Rulers, University of Texas Press, 2006 and an edited volume co-edited with Barbara Fash, Precolumbian Water Management: Ideology, Ritual, and Politics. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2006. More recently, Dr. Lucero has been involved in applying lessons from the past to current issues of water; she contributed to Water and Humanity: A Historical Overview, which will comprise the seventh volume of a series of books on water issues sponsored by UNESCO (Fekri Hassan, general editor; this volume edited by Vernon Scarborough).
Suzanne Malec-McKenna
Suzanne Malec-McKenna serves as Commissioner of the Department of Environment for the City of Chicago. Suzanne was nominated by Mayor Daley for the position in August 2007, and has more than 17 years experience in environmental issues, including sustainable development and ecological preservation and restoration.
Suzanne has served for nearly 15 years in the Department of Environment, most recently as Deputy Commissioner of Natural Resources and Water Quality. Prior to joining City government, she worked as an Urban Forestry Manager for the Openlands Project.
Suzanne has led key efforts for the Department, including Greencorps Chicago, the Chicago Center for Green Technology, the Calumet Initiative, the Chicago Conservation Corps and various water conservation and protection efforts. She serves on various boards and committees, including serving as a founding steering committee member of the Chicago Wilderness Coalition, and Members for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute of Environmental Science and Policy and the Illinois Natural History Survey.
Suzanne has a bachelor’s degree in Ornamental Horticulture from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree in Managerial Communication from Northwestern University. She is currently seeking her Ph.D. from Northwestern in Communication Studies.
Jennifer Monson
Jennifer Monson (Artistic director, choreographer and performer, iLAND) uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections between environmental, philosophical and aesthetic approaches to knowledge and understandings of our surroundings. As Artistic Director of iLAND she creates large scale dance projects informed and inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment Her project BIRD BRAIN (2000-2011) includes the theatrical work Flight of Mind (2005) and four migratory tours: Gray Whales (Spring 2001); Ospreys (Fall 2002); Ducks and Geese (Spring 2004); and Northern Wheatears (Fall 2011). Each tour followed the migrations of animals offering performances, workshops and panel discussions on navigation, migration and conservation. In 2007 she created iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir, a yearlong research and performance practice in an abandoned reservoir in NYC. She is currently working on the Mahomet Aquifer Project in Illinois and Light Weight:Sky Bit which will open the Planet U Environmental Conference at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign April of 2009. In addition through the iLAB residency project of iLAND, Monson supports and mentors collaborative opportunities for movement based artists, scientists, environmentalists and others interested in our physical relationships to space and systems as a means to engage the public in a kinetic understanding of NYC’s urban environment. Monson is currently on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in the Dance Department. She was hired through an initiative of the Environmental Council to foster sustainability across the campus and nationally.
Susanne Moser
Susanne Moser is Director and Principal Researcher of Susanne Moser Research & Consulting, in Santa Cruz, CA. Her current work centers around adaptation to climate change, resilience, decision support, and effective climate change communication in support of social change. Over the past 15 years, her interests have focused on the causes, vulnerability, impacts, and adaptive responses to climate change, especially in coastal areas, public health, and forest communities. Dr. Moser is a geographer by training (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University). Previously she served as a Research Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has worked for the Heinz Center in Washington, DC on a congressionally mandated project on coastal erosion and management, and served as staff scientist for climate change for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Susanne Moser is co-editor with Lisa Dilling (University of Colorado-Boulder) on a major anthology on climate change communication, called Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. She contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Nobel-prize winning IPCC, and is a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership and Donella Meadows Leadership Programs.
Andy Revkin
A prize-winning journalist and author, Andrew Revkin has been a reporter for the New York Times since 1995, mainly covering environmental issues in their social and political context. His 20-plus years of coverage of global warming won one of journalism's top honors in 2008 - a John Chancellor Award. His blog, Dot Earth, engages the public in a discussion of strategies for balancing human activity with the planet's finite resources. He has written books on the Amazon, Arctic, and global warming and two book chapters on the media and the environment. Revkin has taught graduate-level communication courses at Columbia University and Bard College. In spare moments, he is a songwriter and performs in the roots band Uncle Wade.
William Ruddiman
William Ruddiman received a B.A. degree in geology from Williams College in 1964 and a Ph,D degree in marine geology from Columbia University in 1969. He worked at the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office from 1969 to 1976, at Lamont-Doherty Observatory from 1976-1991 (Associate Director from 1980-1984), and at the University of Virginia from 1991-2001 (Chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences from 1993-1996). His research has focused on climate changes at tectonic, orbital, and deglacial time scales. He is author of the college textbook "Earth's Sciences" (2001, 2007) and the trade book "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum" (2005).
Jürgen Scheffran
Jürgen Scheffran is Senior Research Scientist in the Mac Arthur Foundation funded Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security (ACDIS) and Assistant Director for Education in the Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research (CABER) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has adjunct faculty positions at the Departments of Political Science and Atmospheric Sciences. After his physics PhD at the University of Marburg in Germany he worked at the Technical University of Darmstadt, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris (Pantheon/Sorbonne). Research and teaching interests include: energy security and climate change; complex systems analysis and computational modeling; technology assessment and international security. He is involved in the Renewable Energy Initiative at UIUC and related projects funded by the Environmental Council, the Department of Energy and the Energy Biosciences Institute.
Michael E. Schlesinger
Michael E. Schlesinger, PhD is Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Climate Research Group within the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He is an expert in the modeling, simulation and analysis of climate and climate change, with interests in simulating and understanding past, present and possible future climates, climate impacts and climate policy. Dr. Schlesinger has directed NATO and other conferences in Italy, England and the United States; and has edited four books, most recently “Human-Induced Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Assessment.” Dr. Schlesinger has contributed to many assessments of climate change, including those of the IPCC and the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum. Professor Schlesinger is a member of Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s Climate Change Advisory Group. He is a recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, together other contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Vice President Al Gore. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Engineering, and his Ph.D. in Meteorology, all from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dan Vergano
Dan Vergano is a science reporter for USA TODAY, where he has worked for nine years, covering climate alongside science stories ranging from archaeology to zoology. He is the 2006 winner of the David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism from the American Geophysical Union for climate change coverage and was a 2007-08 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard, studying the interplay between science and politics. Dan worked as an engineer and policy analyst before moving to journalism where he has written for Science News, Science, New Scientist, Men's Health, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, in his freelance career. He writes daily and feature news as well as a weekly online column for USA TODAY.
Gillen Wood
Gillen Wood is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois. He is the author of the eco-historical novel Hosack’s Folly (2005), which recreates the politics of water and public health during a yellow fever outbreak in 1820s New York City. Recently, he has edited a special “Climate Crisis” issue of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and published articles on climatology and culture in the early nineteenth century. His current book project is a global study of the ecological, social and cultural impacts of the eruption of Mt.Tambora in 1815, the largest volcanic event of the last 20,000 years. Before turning to climate history, he published two books on romanticism and the metropolitan culture of Georgian Britain.
Don Wuebbles
Don Wuebbles is the Harry E. Preble Endowed Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. Dr. Wuebbles was Director of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment from 2006 until 2008, and was Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences from 1994 until 2006. He earned his B.S. (1970) and M.S. (1972) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of California at Davis in 1983. He is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed scientific articles, most of which relate to atmospheric chemistry and global climate change as affected by both human activities and natural phenomena. His research emphasizes the development and use of mathematical models to study atmospheric chemical and physical processes. He has been a lead author on a number of national and international assessments related to concerns about climate change and about global chemistry issues. Dr. Wuebbles received the 2005 Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union, and a Faculty Fellow in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He shares in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the international U.N.-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Wuebbles was a leader in assessments of the potential impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes region and on the U.S. Northeast, and recently was co-leader of an assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on the city of Chicago. He is a member of a special government task force currently evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on the entire United States.