Woods Hole Research Center Director John P. Holdren named Guest Professor of Tsinghua University

May 23, 2008

WHRC Director, John P. Holdren

John P. Holdren, Director of the Woods Hole Research Center, has been appointed a Guest Professor of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China . He will be formally installed into the professorship on Monday, May 26, and will give a lecture for faculty and staff entitled “Meeting the Climate-Change Challenge: What Do We Know? What Should We Do?” as part of the ceremony.

Tsinghua University is known in the United States as "the MIT of China". It is one of that country's most important universities, with graduates holding leadership positions throughout China's government and industrial sector. (China's President, Hu Jintao, is an alumus.)

Dr. Holdren has been visiting China and working with colleagues in its universities and governmental agencies since 1984. His Guest Professor appointment at Tsinghua is for one year, concluding in May 2009.

“I am deeply honored by this appointment, which will help deepen the ongoing collaboration among the Woods Hole Research Center, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Tsinghua University and other Chinese institutions on how our two countries can work together to address the challenge of climate change.", Holdren said. His inaugural lecture will focus on the disruption of global climate by human activities, which Holdren calls "one of the most complex and daunting challenges that society has ever faced."

He added that “The key question is whether and how industrialized and developing countries alike can create and sustain prosperity for all of their citizens without wrecking the climate (and the crucial environmental conditions and processes that depend on it) with greenhouse-gas emissions from energy supply and tropical deforestation. Getting a sensible answer requires knowing what environmental science can tell us about the pace of climate change and its current and likely future impacts; what the study of technology and economics can tell us about the potential and costs of options for slowing it down; and what the study of public policy can tell us about how to get an adequate set of remedies embraced and implemented.”

According to Dr. Li Yuhong, Deputy Director of the Office of International Cooperation and Exchange at Tsinghua, “We firmly believe that Dr. Holdren will reinforce the research in the field of Public Policy and Environmental Policy.”

Dr. Holdren was Visiting Distinguished Scientist at the Center from 1991-2005 and became Director in June of 2005. He has been the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government since 1996 and previously was the Class of 1935 Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and co-chair of the independent, bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy. From 2005 to 2008 served as President-Elect, President, and Chair of the Board of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Trained in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics at MIT and Stanford, Dr. Holdren's research interests include causes and consequences of global environmental change, energy and resource options in industrial and developing countries, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. He is a former MacArthur Prize Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1995 he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, for which he served as chair of the executive committee from 1987 to 1997.

Founded by Dr. George M. Woodwell in 1985, the Woods Hole Research Center is an independent, nonprofit institute focused on environmental science, policy, and education for sustainable well-being. Its work focuses particularly on the functioning of forests, soils, water, and climate and their connections to human health and economic prosperity. The Center has initiatives in the Amazon, the Arctic, Africa, Russia, Asia, Boreal North America, the Mid-Atlantic, and New England, working with partners ranging from local organizations to national governments and the United Nations.