Climate Frontiers

A celebrated chemist and accomplished administrator, Paul Alivisatos became the 14^th president of the University of Chicago on September 1, 2021.

As President of the University, Alivisatos serves as Chair of the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory and Chair of the Board of Directors of Fermi Research Alliance LLC, the operator of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is also the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and the College.

Alivisatos previously served as the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost (EVCP) of the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to his role as EVCP, Alivisatos was the Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, founding Director of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute, and from 2009-2016 served as Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). A member of Berkeley’s faculty from 1988-2021, he held professorships in the departments of chemistry and materials science, and served in several administrative roles, including Vice Chancellor for Research.

A preeminent scientist and entrepreneur, Alivisatos has made pioneering research breakthroughs in nanomaterials. Contributions to the fundamental physical chemistry of nanocrystals are the hallmarks of his scientific career. His research accomplishments include studies of the scaling laws governing the optical, electrical, structural, and thermodynamic properties of nanocrystals. He developed methods to synthesize size and shape-controlled nanocrystals, and developed methods for preparing branched, hollow, nested, and segmented nanocrystals. In his research, he has demonstrated key applications of nanocrystals in biological imaging and renewable energy. His inventions are widely used in biomedicine and QLED TV displays, and his scientific advances have yielded more than 50 patents.

Alivisatos received his Bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1981 from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Berkeley in 1986. He is a founder of two prominent nanotechnology companies, Nanosys and Quantum Dot Corp, now a part of Thermo Fisher. He is also the founding editor of Nano Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society, and formerly served on the senior editorial board of Science magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Alivisatos has been recognized for his accomplishments with more than 25 awards including the National Medal of Science, the E.O. Lawrence Award, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Dan David Prize, the Von Hippel Award, the Linus Pauling Medal, the Eni Award for Energy and Environment, the Wilhelm Exner Medal, the 2021 Priestley Medal, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences, and the National Academy of Science Award in Chemical Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Katherine Baicker serves as the 15th Provost of the University of Chicago.

As Provost, she is responsible for academic and research programs across the University and oversees the University’s budget.

A leading scholar in the economic analysis of health care policy, she is the Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she served as Dean for five years prior to being appointed Provost.

Baicker’s research focuses on the effectiveness of public and private health insurance, including the effect of reforms on the distribution and quality of care. Her large-scale research projects include the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized evaluation of the effects of Medicaid coverage. Her research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Health Affairs, JAMA, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Baicker was the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a director of Eli Lilly, and a trustee of the Mayo Clinic. Baicker is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers and the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Health Care Management. She has served as Chair of the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission; Chair of the Board of Directors of Academy Health; and Commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. From 2005–2007, she served as a Senate-confirmed Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Baicker earned her B.A. in economics from Yale and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.

Calvin Butler is president and chief executive officer of Exelon, the nation’s largest utility company by customer count, serving 10.5 million electric and gas customers in New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, Delaware, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, through six local electric and natural gas companies. Butler serves on Exelon’s Executive Committee and is a member of the company’s Board of Directors.

Prior to being named CEO at the end of 2022, Butler was president and chief operating officer of Exelon with responsibilities for Exelon’s six local energy companies: Atlantic City Electric, BGE, ComEd, Delmarva Power, PECO and Pepco. Butler also served as CEO of BGE from 2014 to 2019. Previous roles at the company include senior vice president of Corporate Affairs at BGE and vice president of Governmental and Legislative Affairs at ComEd.

Before joining Exelon in 2008, Butler held senior leadership roles with the print, digital and supply chain solutions company R.R. Donnelley. Butler spent his early career with Central Illinois Light Company (CILCORP, Inc.), where he worked in government affairs, legal and strategy.

Butler earned a bachelor’s degree from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., and a Juris Doctor degree from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Mo. He received honorary doctorates from Morgan State University in 2014 and Delaware State University in 2024.

The Honorable Paul M. Dabbar served as the Department’s fourth Under Secretary for Science, He served as the Department’s principal advisor on fundamental energy research, energy technologies, and science, driving this mission through programs including nuclear and high energy particle physics, basic energy, advanced computing, fusion, and biological and environmental research, and direct management over a majority of the Department’s national labs and their world-leading user facilities. In addition, Mr. Dabbar managed the environmental and legacy management missions of the Department, addressing the U.S. legacy of nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. In addition, Mr. Dabbar is the lead for technology commercialization activities for the Department and its 17 national labs.

During his time in government service, Mr. Dabbar has traveled to both the North and South Poles.  He traveled to the North Pole by submarine to conduct environmental research while in the Navy, and to the South Pole in support of high energy physics astronomy missions by the Department at South Pole Station.

Prior to confirmation as Under Secretary for Science, Mr. Dabbar worked in operations, finance, and strategy roles in the energy sector. As a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, leading various energy business areas, he has over $400 billion in investment experience across all energy sectors including solar, wind, geothermal, distributed-generation, utility, LNG, pipeline, oil & gas, trading, and energy technologies, and has also led the majority of all nuclear transactions. In addition, he had a senior leadership role for the company’s commodity trading business, including power, oil and gas.

Before joining J.P. Morgan, Mr. Dabbar served as a nuclear submarine officer in Mare Island, California, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He also served on the Department of Energy Environmental Management Advisory Board. He has been a lecturer at the U.S. Naval Academy, and conducted research at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Dabbar received a B.S. degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, and a masters degree from Columbia University. Mr. Dabbar and his wife, Andrea, are the parents of two children.

Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Springfield, is the 47th U.S. Senator from the State of Illinois, the state’s senior senator, and the convener of Illinois’ bipartisan congressional delegation.

Durbin also serves as the Senate Majority Whip, the second highest ranking position among the Senate Democrats. Senator Durbin has been elected to this leadership post by his Democratic colleagues every two years since 2005.

Durbin serves as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and sits on the Appropriations and Agriculture Committees.

Elected to the U.S. Senate on November 5, 1996, and re-elected in 2002, 2008, 2014, and 2020, Durbin fills the seat left vacant by the retirement of his long-time friend and mentor, U.S. Senator Paul Simon.

Michael Greenstone is founding faculty Director of the new climate and energy institute, as well as the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, the College and the Harris School. He is also the Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. He was formerly the Director of the Becker Friedman Institute. He previously served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he co-led the development of the United States Government’s social cost of carbon. Greenstone also directed The Hamilton Project, which studies policies to promote economic growth, and has since joined its Advisory Council. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT.

Greenstone’s research, which has influenced policy globally, is largely focused on uncovering the benefits and costs of environmental quality and society’s energy choices. His current work is particularly focused on testing innovative ways to increase energy access and improve the efficiency of environmental regulations around the world. Additionally, he is producing empirically grounded estimates of the local and global impacts of climate change as a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab. He also created the Air Quality Life Index that provides a measure of the gain in life expectancy communities would experience if their particulates air pollution concentrations are brought into compliance with global or national standards.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

Amy Harder is the founding executive editor of Cipher. She is one of the top national energy and climate change reporters in the country, having built up a reputation of being a uniquely balanced and influential journalist with respect across the spectrum.

With more than a dozen years of experience under her belt, Amy believes seeing energy infrastructure up close and interviewing people directly affected by it is paramount to ensure a well-rounded story.  

Amy has toured everything from an underground coal mine in West Virginia to a wind farm in Australia to a carbon capture facility in Norway. She has also interviewed some of the most well-known leaders in this space, and at the same time, bridges the gap between what leaders say and what everyday people care about. 

She began her career at National Journal, a Washington, D.C.-based publication, covering the fracking and oil and natural gas boom of the 2010s. She was then recruited by The Wall Street Journal to lead its Washington, D.C. energy coverage. In 2017, Axios hired her as one of their first two energy reporters when it launched that year. While at Axios, she quickly fortified her leading journalistic voice on climate change before it had become broadly mainstream. 

Amy was the inaugural journalism fellow for the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago for the 2018-2019 school year, where she moderated events and took part in other university initiatives. 

Breakthrough Energy recruited Amy in early 2021 to launch an independent news outlet helping to educate people on complex climate technologies. First launched in 2021 as a newsletter platform, Cipher expanded to a full news website in 2023. 

She has appeared on PBS NewsHour, CSPAN, MSNBC, CBS and NPR, among many other media outlets. She is regularly sought out to speak and participate in events, including moderating and participating in panel discussions, and giving speeches around the country and the world. 

U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp was the first female senator elected from North Dakota, serving from 2013–2019.

During her six years in the U.S. Senate, Heitkamp quickly became a proven senator who worked across the aisle to fight for North Dakotans. She personally showed that if senators work together, it can lead to real solutions. Throughout her time in public service, Heidi prioritized improving the lives of Indigenous people and working families; stopping human trafficking and violence against women; guaranteeing affordable health care; addressing childhood trauma; eliminating unnecessary regulation and securing a U.S. energy policy that keeps costs low but achieves climate goals. Providing equal economic opportunity for Rural America continues to be her lifelong pursuit.

Heitkamp previously served as North Dakota’s Attorney General, and elected State Tax Commissioner. She serves on numerous boards including The McCain Institute, The Howard Buffett Foundation, Restore Democracy Initiative and The German Marshall Fund. She is the founder and Chair of the One Country Project, an organization focused on addressing the needs and concerns of rural America. She serves as a contributor to both CNBC and ABC News.

David Keith has worked near the interface of climate science, energy technology, and public policy since 1990. He took first prize in Canada’s national physics prize exam, won MIT’s prize for excellence in experimental physics, and was one of TIME Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment. Keith is Professor of Geophysical Sciences and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago.

Best known for his work on the science, technology, and public policy of solar geoengineering, Keith led the development of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program before moving to Chicago in 2023. His policy work has ranged from analysis of electricity markets and carbon prices to research on public and expert perceptions of risky technologies. Keith’s hardware work includes the first interferometer for atoms, a high-accuracy infrared spectrometer for NASA’s ER-2, the development of an air contactor, and the development of a stratospheric propelled balloon experiment for solar geoengineering.

Keith founded Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company developing technology to capture CO₂ from ambient air. He teaches science and technology policy, climate science, and solar geoengineering. He has reached more than 150,000 students worldwide with an edX energy course and has authored more than 200 academic publications with a total citation count of more than 20,000. Keith has written for the public through numerous opinion pieces and wrote the book A Case for Climate Engineering.

Nathaniel Keohane is President of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), a widely respected, nonpartisan non-profit organization that works with policy makers and leading businesses to accelerate the transition to a thriving, just, and resilient net-zero-emissions economy. Dr. Keohane is a globally recognized expert on climate policy, carbon markets, and the economics of climate change. He has more than 20 years of energy and environmental policy experience in academia, government, and the non-profit sector, including at Environmental Defense Fund, where he held a range of roles including Chief Economist and most recently Senior Vice President for Climate; in the White House, as Special Assistant to President Obama for Energy and Environment in the National Economic Council (2011-2012); and, earlier in his career, as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and a B.A. from Yale.

Hina Rabbani Khar is a Pakistani stateswoman and economist who was the 26th Foreign Minister of Pakistan. Hailing from a powerful feudal family, she began her political career in 2002 in the government of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and subsequently served in the Finance Ministry and Foreign Ministry as Minister of State. After successfully contesting the 2008 general election, she served again in the Finance Ministry and directed policies concerning the national economy in the absence of the then Finance Minister in 2009. She was appointed the first female Foreign Minister in July 2011. Since 2008, she has been a senior and high-ranking member of the Central Executive Committee, and is widely regarded as one of the highest ranking women in Pakistani politics.

Y. Shirley Meng is a professor of molecular engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She also serves as the chief scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA).

Her work pioneers in discovering and designing better materials for energy storage by a unique combination of first-principles computation guided materials discovery and design, and advanced characterization with electron/neutron/photon sources. Meng is the principal investigator of the research group – Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC). She has received several prestigious awards, including the Faraday Medal of Royal Chemistry Society (2020), International Battery Association Battery IBA Research Award (2019), Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Finalist (2018), C.W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016), Science Award Electrochemistry by BASF and Volkswagen (2014) and NSF CAREER Award (2011). Meng is the elected fellow of Electrochemical Society (FECS) and elected fellow of Materials Research Society (FMRS). She serves as the editor-in-chief for Materials Research Society MRS Energy & Sustainability Journal.

Meng received her PhD in Advanced Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, and her bachelor’s degree with first-class honor from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2000. She worked as a postdoctoral research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT from 2005-2007. Meng was the Zable Endowed Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) before joining PME at the University of Chicago.

John Podesta serves as the White House Senior Adviser for International Climate Policy, having previously served as the Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation. He is the founder of the Center for American Progress. Podesta served as counselor to President Barack Obama, where he was responsible for coordinating the administration’s climate policy and initiatives. In 2008, he served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition team. He was a member of the U.N. Secretary General’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Podesta previously served as White House chief of staff to President William J. Clinton. He chaired Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016.