Michael Oppenheimer, Vice Chair

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), the Department of Geosciences, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the Director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE) at SPIA and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Oppenheimer also holds a continuing visiting professorship at NYU School of Law where he teaches a joint Princeton-NYU graduate/law course on international environmental agreements.

Dr. Oppenheimer joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. He continues to serve as a science advisor to EDF. Prior to his position at EDF, Dr. Oppenheimer served as Atomic and Molecular Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Lecturer on Astronomy at Harvard University. He received an S.B. in chemistry from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago, and pursued post-doctoral research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

He is the author of over 200 articles published in professional journals and is co-author (with Robert H. Boyle) of a 1990 book, Dead Heat: The Race Against The Greenhouse Effect. He is also coauthor of the book Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, published in 2019 by the University of Chicago Press.

Oppenheimer is a long-time participant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, serving recently as a Coordinating Lead Author on IPCC’s Special Report on Oceans, Cryosphere, and Climate Change and as a Review Editor on the Sixth Assessment Report. Oppenheimer served previously as a member of several panels of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the National Academies’ Board on Energy and Environmental Studies. He is also a winner of the Heinz Award and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Oppenheimer is also co-editor of interdisciplinary scientific journal, Climatic Change and serves of the New York Panel on Climate Change, providing technical advice to the City.

His interests include science and policy of the atmosphere, particularly climate change, the risks and impacts climate change entails, and adaptation and other human responses. His research aims to understand the potential for “dangerous” outcomes of increasing levels of greenhouse gases by exploring the effects of global warming on the ice sheets and sea level, on the risk from coastal storms, and on patterns of human migration. He also studies the process of scientific learning and scientific assessments and their role in understanding problems of global change.

In the late 1980's, Dr. Oppenheimer and a handful of other scientists organized two workshops under the auspices of the United Nations that helped precipitate the negotiations that resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (signed at the 1992 Earth Summit) and the Kyoto Protocol. During that period, he co-founded the Climate Action Network. His research and advocacy work on acid rain also contributed to the passage of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. Dr. Oppenheimer has been a guest on many television and radio programs, including ABC's This Week, 60 Minutes, The NewsHour, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and the Colbert Report.