Serge Appel

Serge Appel joined Cook+Fox in 1996 and has helped shape a small architectural practice into an award-winning firm. He works closely with the firm’s founding partners and has played a key role in many of the firm’s major projects. He was named an Associate in 1999 and a Senior Associate in 2006. In 2007, he was named Associate Partner.

Most recently, Serge played a key role in the development of 130 West 12th Street, a prewar condominium in the heart of Greenwich Village slated for LEED Silver certification. Prior to this project, Serge worked on Cook+Fox’s largest project to date, the LEED Platinum 2.2 million square foot Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. With a specialty in large-scale, multi-use complex projects, he has developed an expertise in the techniques involved in the construction of modern high-rise buildings, and an understanding of how such processes inform design solutions. He was recently instrumental in the competition-winning design of the 3.3 million square foot 3.3 million square foot, mixed-use development at Government Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and the new LEED Platinum headquarters of Skanska USA, located in the Empire State Building. Serge was also responsible for 360 Madison, a 350,000 square foot, 26 story office building that was called “the best new building in years” by the New York Sun. At both Cook+Fox and its predecessor firm, Richard Cook & Associates, Serge has worked on all phases of planning, design, and construction for a wide range of master planning, residential, institutional, and commercial projects.

Serge graduated from McGill University School of Architecture in Montreal, Quebec in 1996. He became a licensed architect in New York State in 2000 and a LEED Accredited Professional in 2004. He speaks frequently on sustainable architecture and the design of the Bank of America Tower.

TALK

Lauranne Bardin

Lauranne Bardin is the Assistant Director of the Alliance Program since September 2011. She is in charge of the management of the academic seminars and the Alliance annual programs (Calls for Doctoral Mobility, Visiting Professorships, Scholarships, etc) and provides support to speakers, visiting professors and students.

Prior to that, she worked as the Coordinator of the actions of cooperation with the neighboring countries of the European Union under the French Agency of the European Program Youth in Action.

Lauranne holds a Master's Degree in European Project Management from the Universite Cergy Pontoise.

Prof. Scott Barrett

Scott Barrett is the Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at SIPA and the Earth Institute. He was previously a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he also directed the International Policy program. Before that, he was on the faculty of the London Business School. He has also been a visiting scholar at Yale. Barrett's research focuses on transnational and global challenges, ranging from climate change to infectious diseases. He is the author of Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making, published in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2005. His most recent book, Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods, also published by Oxford University Press, was published in paperback with a new afterword in 2010. Barrett's research has been awarded the Resources for the Future Dissertation Prize and the Erik Kempe Award. He has advised a number of international organizations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, the European Commission, and the International Task Force on Global Public Goods. He was previously a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the Academic Panel to the Department of Environment in the UK.  Barrett is a research fellow with the Beijer Institute (Stockholm), CESifo (Munich), and the Kiel Institute of World Economics. He received his PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.

TALK

Assaf Biderman

Assaf Biderman teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Associate Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a research group that explores the "real- time city" by studying the increasing deployment of sensors and networked hand-held electronics, as well as their relationship to the built environment.

At the 2006 Venice Biennale, the group revealed the world's first city-scale dynamic maps, describing the movement of pedestrians, busses, and taxis in real-time. In preparation for the 2009 U.N. Summit on Climate change in Copenhagen, the lab developed a hybrid bicycle wheel which captures the energy of braking to give riders an extra push.

Biderman's work focuses on engaging city administrations and industry members worldwide to explore how pressing issues in urbanization are being impacted by a wave of new distributed technologies, and how these can be harnessed to create a more sustainable future living in urban environments.

TALK

Eric Bret

Eric Bret is responsible for the EDF Group’s activities in North America. In his capacities, Eric is Chairman of the Board of Directors, President, and CEO of EDF Inc. and Vice-chairman of the Board of Directors of Constellation Energy Nuclear Group LLC. He also serves as Director at the Boards of UniStar Nuclear Energy, EDF Trading North America, LLC, and enXco, an EDF EN company.

This leadership position follows almost 30 years of service with the EDF Group.

Prior to leading EDF’s North American operations, Eric was Deputy Vice President of the EDF generation fleet since 2006. In this capacity, Mr. Bret has had oversight of EDF’s nuclear power plant operations in France, including 58 reactors at 19 sites.

Mr. Bret joined EDF in 1982, when he began his engineering career as a training instructor. He rapidly moved to become the head of the safety and quality team of a nuclear power plant before becoming deputy head and then head of a four 900 MW-reactor nuclear power plant in France. He managed the Nuclear Center for Electricity Production until he was promoted to Deputy Vice President of the EDF generation fleet in 2006.

In addition, Mr. Bret was instrumental in the EDF teams supporting the start up operations of nuclear power plants in South Africa (Koeberg 1 & 2) and in China (Daya Bay 1 & 2).

Mr. Bret is an engineer from the Industrial Chemistry and Physics Institute (ICPI) of Lyon. He is married and has 3 daughters.

TALK

Dr. Andrea Bubula

Andrea Bubula’s expertise is in applied open-economy macroeconomics and finance. His research focuses on the choice of the exchange rate regime and nominal anchor across countries and over time. He has also examined the determinants of interest rate differentials in developing countries. Dr. Bubula earned his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 2004 and holds a 'Laurea' and 'Dottorato di Ricerca' from Universita' di Roma, La Sapienza. He has worked at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and was a Fellow of International Affairs at Yale University. In 2008 he received the Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

TALK

Prof. Lawrence Burns

Lawrence Burns is an Engineering Professor at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Roundtable on Sustanable Mobility at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. From May 1998 to October 2009, he served as General Motors Corporate Vice President of Research & Development and Planning/Strategic Planning, reporting directly to CEO/President.  He has been a member of top decision boards for global operations and products and responsible for advanced technology development, product portfolio planning, capacity planning and strategic planning.  Prior to being named vice president, Burns held a wide range of leadership positions in GM operations, including industrial engineering, quality, production control, product/manufacturing/business planning, and product program management.

His studies include a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 1978, an  M.S. in Engineering / Public Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a  B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), Flint, MI.

TALK

John Coatsworth

John H. Coatsworth is the Provost of Columbia University, as well as Professor of International and Public Affairs and of History.

Provost Coatsworth is a leading scholar of Latin American economic and international history. Previously, he was Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. Prior to his appointment as Dean in 2008, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia University (2006 – 2007) and Interim Dean of SIPA (2007 – 2008).

Before Joining Columbia, Coatsworth served as the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard University (1992–2007). He was the founding director of Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the chair of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies. Prior to his work at Harvard, Coatsworth was a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago (1969–1992). Other academic posts have included visiting professorships at El Colegio de México, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the National University of Buenos Aires, the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, and the Instituto Ortega y Gassett in Madrid.

Coatsworth is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Board of Directors of the Tinker Foundation and numerous professional associations. He is the former president of the American Historical Association and Latin American Studies Association. Coatsworth has served on the editorial boards of scholarly journals including the American Historical Review, the Journal of Economic History, the Hispanic American Historical Review and other social science journals published in Britain, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Peru, and Spain.

In 1986, Coatsworth was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He has served as Senior Fulbright Lecturer three times, with appointments in Argentina and Mexico, and has received numerous research and institutional grants from public agencies and private foundations. He has acted as a consultant for program design or review to numerous U.S. universities and foundations.

Coatsworth received his BA in History from Wesleyan University, and his MA and PhD in Economic History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

DISCUSSION

Prof. Andrew Dolkart

Andrew S. Dolkart, the Director of the Historic Preservation Program and the James Marston Fitch Associate Professor of Historic Preservation, is a graduate of Colgate University and Columbia's Historic Preservation Program. He has been active in historic preservation in New York City for over thirty years, both as a staff member at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, as a freelance consultant, and as a teacher. He has worked extensively with neighborhood groups on preservation efforts and has completed scores of National Register nominations, Landmark Commission designation reports, and historic resource surveys for environmental reviews. Andrew has also written extensively about his passion, the architecture and development of New York City, focusing in particular on the city's everyday, vernacular building types. His books include the award-winning Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development and Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street. His latest book, The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City 1908-1929 was published in the fall of 2009 and has won several architectural history awards. He is currently writing on the development of New York's Garment District lofts. In addition, Andrew has curated exhibitions, is a board member of several local preservation groups, has been interviewed for many documentaries, and is well-known for his architectural walking tours of New York. At Columbia, Andrew teaches classes in American architecture and in the architecture and development of New York City, as well as Studio and Documentation.

TALK

Jhaelen Eli

Jhaelen Eli is the development director at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. He is a core member of the operations group that oversees the strategic management and profitability of the 100-person studio. His responsibilities include the acquisition of new work as well as contract and fee negotiations.

Among the various projects of DS+R’s international body of work: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, including the redesign of Alice Tully Hall, the renovation and expansion of The Juilliard School, the Hypar Pavilion Lawn, and Public Spaces throughout the campus; the High Line, an urban park situated on an obsolete elevated railway stretching 1.5 miles long through the Chelsea area of New York City; the Institute of Contemporary Art on Boston’s waterfront; the Creative Arts Center at Brown University; and Blur, built on Lake Neuchâtel for the 2002 Swiss Expo.

Projects currently in design include: the Broad Art Museum in downtown Los Angeles, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley; the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York City; the Museum of Image & Sound on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and the Hirshhorn Museum Seasonal Inflatable Pavilion on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

Mr. Eli joined DS+R in 2008 and became Associate in 2009. Prior to joining DS+R, Mr. Eli served as Director of Business Development & Design at Empyrean International, a residential pre-fab company. He received his M.Arch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and his B.Arts from the University of California Berkeley. Mr. Eli joined the Dean’s Advisory Council at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design in 2012 and is an adjunct faculty member at Parsons New School for Design where he teaches management courses.

TALK

Prof. Michael B. Gerrard

Michael B. Gerrard is Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on environmental and energy law and directs the Center for Climate Change Law. He is also Associate Chair of the Faculty of Columbia’s Earth Institute. Before joining the Columbia faculty in January 2009, he was partner in charge of the 110-lawyer New York office of Arnold & Porter LLP; he is now Senior Counsel to the firm. He practiced environmental law in New York City full time from 1979 to 2008 and tried numerous cases and argued many appeals in federal and state courts and administrative tribunals. He was the 2004-2005 chair of the American Bar Association’s 10,000-member Section of Environment, Energy and Resources. He has also chaired the Executive Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and the Environmental Law Section of the New York State Bar Association. He is currently a member of the executive committees of the boards of the Environmental Law Institute and the American College of Environmental Lawyers.

Since 1986, Gerrard has written an environmental law column for the New York Law Journal, and since 1989 he has been editor of a monthly newsletter, Environmental Law in New York. He is author or editor of ten books, two of which were named Best Law Book of the Year by the Association of American Publishers: Environmental Law Practice Guide (twelve volumes, 1992) and Brownfields Law and Practice: The Cleanup and Redevelopment of Contaminated Land (four volumes, 1998). His other books are Environmental Impact Review in New York (two volumes, with Philip Weinberg and Daniel Ruzow, 1990); Whose Backyard, Whose Risk: Fear and Fairness in Toxic and Nuclear Waste Siting (1994); The Law of Environmental Justice (with Sheila Foster) (1999, 2d ed. 2008); Amending CERCLA (with Joel Gross) (2006); Global Climate Change and U.S. Law (2007); The Law of Green Buildings (with Cullen Howe) (2010); The Law of Clean Energy: Efficiency and Renewables (2011); and The Law of Adaptation to Climate Change: U.S. and International Aspects (with Katrina F. Kuh) (2012).

Legal Media Group’s Guide to the World’s Leading Environment Lawyers, based on 4,000 questionnaires, reported in 2005 and again in 2007 that Gerrard "received more personal nominations for this guide than any other lawyer in the world."

He received his B.A. from Columbia University and his J.D. from New York University Law School, where he was a Root Tilden Scholar.

TALK

Dr. Stephen A. Hammer

Dr. Stephen Hammer specializes in energy planning, with a primary focus on cities. At MIT he teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate energy planning and policy courses. He also currently serves as an advisor on low carbon city planning to the USDOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and is co-founder of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN). Dr. Hammer recently completed several urban ‘green growth’ studies for the OECD in Paris, and helped lead the development of the World Bank’s Tool for Rapid Assessment of City Energy (TRACE) and served as team leader of the Bank’s energy efficiency study of DaNang, Vietnam.

In 2009-2010, Dr. Hammer led the Energy Smart Cities Initiative, a China-based program providing energy and climate policy training to more than 200 local government officials around China, a project carried out in collaboration with the National Academy for Mayors of China and China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development (MOHURD). Prior to joining MIT, he taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he founded and directed the Urban Energy Program at the Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy.

Dr. Hammer has written on local energy policymaking, urban energy systems, distributed generation technology, and the impacts of climate change on local and regional energy networks. He serves on the editorial board of the academic journals Local Environment and Urban Climate; is a reviewer for the journal Energy Policy; and was the co-editor of Climate Change and Cities, published by Cambridge University Press in May 2011.

Dr. Hammer holds a PhD degree from the London School of Economics, an MPP from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a B.S. from the University of California at Davis.

REFLECTION SESSION (TUESDAY)
REFLECTION SESSION (THURSDAY)
CLOSING DISCUSSION (FRIDAY)

Prof. Matthew Kotchen

Matthew Kotchen is an associate professor of environmental economics and policy at Yale University. His primary appointment is in the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, with affiliated appointments in the Yale School of Management and the Department of Economics. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Professor Kotchen's research interests lie at the intersection of environmental and public economics, and ongoing projects employ both theoretical and empirical methods covering a range of topics, including energy, climate change, "green" markets, corporate social responsibility, and applied game theory. Several projects involve collaborations with ecologists and political scientists. Kotchen joined the Yale faculty in 2009 and has held previous and visiting positions at Williams College, University of California (Santa Barbara and Berkeley), Stanford University, and Resources for the Future (RFF).

TALK

Alessia Lefébure

Mrs. Alessia Lefébure is the Director of the Alliance Program since the spring 2011. Prior to this, she has served as the Director of the Centre for Asia and the Pacific at Sciences Po, from 2006 to 2011. In this position, she was responsible for the definition, implementation and development of the school’s institutional policies towards the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. She managed a seven-member staff in Paris and coordinated a network of representative offices in China and India. She was in charge of developing relationships with universities and research institutes as well as governments, NGOs, press, alumni, and students in the Asia-Pacific region.

Between 2001 and 2006 she was based in Beijing, at Tsinghua University, where she served as Sciences Po’s permanent representative for Greater China. She acquired an in-depth understanding of China and was able to strengthen academic ties with Chinese institutions.

Within Sciences Po, she was the head of Career services, from 1999 to 2001, and served as Executive Training Programme Manager for Economics and Finance. Her previous professional experience includes Communication Manager for the French State owned bank Caisse des Dépots et Consignations, and International Programme Coordinator for a French research centre on European Criminal Law (ARPE).

She holds a Masters in Comparative Law at LUISS (Rome, Italy) and a Masters in Communication and Journalism at Sciences Po. She also speaks Mandarin fluently. Her experience in a series of international positions within academic and research institutions has provided her with the background and knowledge necessary to pursue her PhD in Sociology at Sciences Po on higher education models in China. At present, she also teaches a class titled, "Higher education, policy and development in Asia," at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Bertrand Lortholary

Mr. Bertrand Lortholary took up the post of Consul General of France in New York on September 1, 2012.

Bertrand Lortholary joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after graduating from the Institute of Political Science (Sciences-Po) in Paris, the University of Paris-Dauphine, the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, studying Chinese), and finally from the National School of Administration (ENA, in the 1997 “Marc Bloch” graduation year). He began his career at the Quai d’Orsay as a member of the Directorate of Africa and the Indian Ocean team, where he mainly followed the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He later joined the Political Affairs General Director’s staff, where he stayed from 1998 to 2001.

His career continued, first in Washington, as an exchange diplomat at the State Department, then at the French Embassy, where he followed Asian and African political matters, between 2002 and 2005. After Washington, he served as a political adviser in Beijing from 2005 to 2008.

From 2008 to 2012, he was the French President’s advisor on Asian and Oceania matters.

Bertrand Lortholary was born in November, 1968. He is married and has three children.

TALK

Prof. Jürg Matter

Jürg M. Matter is a Lamont Associate Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, The Earth Institute, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, both at Columbia University, New York. Matter studied earth sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Z), where he received a M.S. degree before completing his PhD in natural sciences at the Department of Earth Sciences. In 2002 he joined the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as a postdoctoral research scientist. In 2005 he was appointed Associate Research Scientist and in 2010 Lamont Associate Research Professor. After joining Columbia University, Matter’s main research interest is on carbon capture and storage with a particular focus on permanent geologic carbon sequestration through mineral carbonation. He conducts experimental work in the laboratory as well as in the field. He uses geochemical and geophysical methods to characterize CO2-water-rock interactions that occur in geologic reservoirs after the injection of CO2. He also develops new tracer techniques for monitoring and accounting of CO2 transport, reactivity, and storage. Matter’s work is interdisciplinary with strong ties to the private sector. He is currently involved in several pilot CO2 storage projects in the U.S., Iceland, and the Sultanate of Oman.

TALK

Prof. Andrew Nathan

Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights. He is engaged in longterm research and writing on Chinese foreign policy and on sources of political legitimacy in Asia, the latter research based on data from the Asian Barometer Survey, a multi-national collaborative survey research project active in eighteen countries in Asia.

Nathan is chair of the administrative committee of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science, 2003-2006, chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2002-2003, and director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 1991-1995. Off campus, he is co-chair of the board, Human Rights in China, a member of the boards of Freedom House and of the National Endowment for Democracy, and a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, which he chaired, 1995-2000. He is the regular Asia and Pacific book reviewer for Foreign Affairs.

Nathan’s books include Peking Politics, 1918-1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Chinese Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Human Rights in Contemporary China, with R. Randle Edwards and Louis Henkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security, with Robert S. Ross (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); The Tiananmen Papers, co-edited with Perry Link (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001); China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files, co-authored with Bruce Gilley (New York: New York Review Books, 2003); How East Asians View Democracy, co-edited with Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, and Doh Chull Shin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and China’s Search for Security, co-authored with Andrew Scobell (Columbia University Press, 2012).

Davidson Norris

Davidson Norris, a practicing architect, is a principal of Carpenter Norris Consulting (CNC), a daylighting design and consulting firm in New York City. Norris has broad experience in the technical analysis of daylighting issues, ranging from solar site analysis to daylight availability on the work surface; in daylighting systems and materials ranging from prismatic glass to tracking mirrors; and in the interwoven aesthetics of daylight and architectural space.

CNC has served as daylighting consultants on a wide range of projects including museums (the Guggenheim), court houses (the Bronx Criminal Courthouse), office buildings (Hoffman LaRoche Administration Building), convention centers (Austin Convention Center Extension), laboratories (Novartis), and urban parks (Tear Drop Park). CNC has also served as the primary designers for special daylighting devices such as the Solar Light Pipe and the Sky Wedge.

Norris, a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture, has taught daylighting in the graduate lighting design program at Parsons School of Design. He presently teaches sustainable design and architectural daylighting courses at Columbia School of Architecture.

His work has received awards from the U.S. Department of Energy, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Endowment of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the IALD and ID magazine.

TALK

Tony Robins

Photo credit: Joyce Ravid

Anthony W. Robins is an historian, writer, and lecturer specializing in New York City architecture and development. After earning a Masters Degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Mr. Robins spent 20 years at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, where he served as Deputy Director of Research and then Director of Survey, supervising the staff identifying new landmarks and historic districts. His work in historic preservation won him a "Rome Prize" from the American Academy in Rome in 1997. Since 1998, he has been in private practice as a consultant architectural historian. He has served as Board Member and Vice-President of the Art Deco Society of New York, and is currently a Board member of the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America.

In a parallel career, Mr. Robins has lectured, taught and published on the city’s architecture and history. Publications include half a dozen guides to the city’s historic neighborhoods; Classics of American Architecture: The World Trade Center (1987; revised edition, 2011), called the first serious book on the subject; the text of Subway Style ( 2004), on the art and architecture of the subway system; and the forthcoming Grand Central Terminal: 100 Years of a New York Landmark, celebrating the Terminal's upcoming centennial. He has also published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Preservation, Progressive Architecture and Architectural Record, and is the author of 45 interpretive Heritage Trails Site Markers placed at historic and architectural sites in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Robins has taught at Pratt Institute and Williams College, and currently teaches at NYU and Columbia. He leads an annual seminar, now in its 27th year, at the Municipal Art Society, teaching New Yorkers how to conduct research on the city’s buildings. And for more than 30 years he has led popular walking tours of the city.

TALK

Dr. Gavin Schmidt

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the present day climate, while investigating their response to climate forcing. He is the co-author, with Joshua Wolfe, of Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009), a book which combines images of the effects of climate change with scientific explanations. He earned a BA (Hons) in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London. He is contributing editor to the blog RealClimate.org.

TALK

Prof. William Solecki

Dr. William Solecki’s research focuses on urban environmental change and transition, and climate change and cities. He is the Director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities and Professor of Geography at Hunter College-CUNY. He served as an author of the IPCC AR4 and now again on the IPCC AR5, as a member of the scientific steering committee of IHDP, Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Core (UGEC) Project, and as panel member on U.S. National Research Council committees. He is a co-founder of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) and co-editor of the recent Climate Change and Cities Assessment (ARC3) Report. He has served as the co-leader of several climate impacts studies in the greater New York and New Jersey region, including the New York City on Panel on Climate Change (NPCC).

Prof. Solecki received an A.B. in Geography from Columbia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Rutgers University on the same discipline.

TALK

Petra Todorovich

Petra Todorovich is director of America 2050, Regional Plan Association’s national infrastructure planning and policy program, which provides leadership on a broad range of transportation, sustainability, and economic-development issues impacting America’s growth in the 21st century. Todorovich oversees America 2050’s research, advocacy, and planning, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and foundation supporters. Since 2009, she has co-authored three publications on high-speed rail in America and is a frequent speaker on the topics of transportation policy and megaregions. Prior to the launch of America 2050, Todorovich directed RPA's Region's Core program and coordinated the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a network of organizations that came together shortly after 9/11 to promote the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and Lower Manhattan. Todorovich is also an Assistant Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute, where her teaching focuses on implementing plans and projects in dynamic, politically fragmented, metropolitan regions. Todorovich received a B.A. from Vassar College, and a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University.

TALK

Prof. Ion Bogdan Vasi

Ion Bogdan Vasi received his PhD in Sociology from Cornell University in 2005 and joined the School of International and Public Affairs and the Department of Sociology (by courtesy) at Columbia University in the same year. Professor Vasi's research focuses on how social movements contribute to the diffusion of technological innovations, organizational change, and policymaking. He also studies industry emergence and the adoption and implementation of environmental practices by businesses. His major areas of interest are social movements, organizational behavior, environmental sociology, political and economic sociology, and his research is often situated at the intersection of those areas. His recent published work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Mobilization. He recently completed a book with Oxford University Press entitled Winds of Change. The Environmental Movement and the Global Development of the Wind Energy Industry.

TALK

Dr. Marta Vicarelli

Marta Vicarelli is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the risks and the socio-economic impacts of climate variability and climate change, as well as on the design of vulnerability-reduction instruments, such as weather-indexed insurance programs.

From 2004 to 2010, she worked as research fellow at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies investigating observed impacts and responses to climate change. She is contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group II, on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. She is the recipient of the Peccei Fellowship (2007) awarded by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna for her work on integrating inter-annual climate variability forecasts into weather-indexed crop insurance. In 2009 she was awarded the Giorgio Ruffolo Fellowship by the Harvard University Sustainability Science Program; the award came with the invitation to work as Fellow at the Harvard University’s Center for International Development from 2009 to 2011.

She holds a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a Master of Environmental Economics from the École Polytechnique, as well as a Master of International Affairs and a Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Columbia University.

INTRODUCTION (WEDNESDAY)
TALK

Gernot Wagner

Gernot Wagner is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, where he works on market-based solutions to a wide range of environmental problems. He teaches energy economics as adjunct faculty at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and wrote But will the planet notice?, published by Hill & Wang/Farrar Strauss & Giroux. He served on the editorial board of the Financial Times as a Peter Martin Fellow, where he covered economics, energy, and the environment. He also worked for the Boston Consulting Group advising clients on clean technology and carbon market strategies. He holds a bachelor’s in environmental science and a master’s and Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard, as well as a master’s in economics from Stanford. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

TALK

Prof. Dorian Warren

Dorian T. Warren is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, the School of International and Public Affairs, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is also a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Warren specializes in the study of inequality and American politics. His research and teaching interests include labor organizing and politics, race and ethnic politics, urban politics and policy, American political development, community organizing, social movements, and social science methodology.

TALK