Speakers

Dorit Aviv

Weitzman School of Design Assistant Professor of Architecture

Dorit Aviv, PhD, AIA is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where she directs the Thermal Architecture Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory focused on the intersection of thermodynamics, architectural design, and material science. Her work examines how architectural materials and forms can impact airflows, energy interactions, and human health. She is a licensed architect and holds a PhD in architectural technology from Princeton University. Her current projects include a distributed environmental sensing network, development of radiative cooling for hot-humid climates, a combined evaporative and radiative cooling prototype for desert climate, and indoor environmental quality control and assessment technologies.

Guy Grossman

David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations Penn Arts & Sciences, Political Science Dept.

Guy Grossman, PhD, the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations at the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is in applied political economy, with a substantive focus on governance, migration and forced displacement, human trafficking, and conflict processes, (mostly) in the context of developing countries. Grossman is the the founder and co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab), launched in 2020. At Penn, he is also a Faculty Affiliate at The Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration Study (CSERI), a member of Wharton’s Lauder Graduate Group in International Studies, and an advisory board member of the Penn Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics.

Steve Decina

Executive Director - Office of the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action - Penn Climate

Stephen Decina is executive director of the Office of the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action. A biogeochemist, he previously served for five years in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. In this role, he led collaborative environmental initiatives and negotiations across the G7 and G20 groups of global partners and the United Nations Environment Program, represented the United States on the United Nations International Resource Panel, helped to develop the Cities Forward Initiative, and led efforts to combat wildlife trafficking across the Western Hemisphere, Middle East, North Africa, and maritime sphere. He was previously at the Environmental Protection Agency in the Office of Radiation and Indoor Air, where he worked to improve childhood air quality exposure in vulnerable communities. He has also consulted for the United Nations Foundation Clean Cooking Alliance as an analyst and educator on household energy standards. He received a PhD in biology, with a specialization in biogeosciences, from Boston University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he analyzed urban air pollution through patterns and sources of emissions. Before his work as a scientist, Dr. Decina taught science for over a decade in Newark, New Jersey and New York City and co-founded a science camp for children in foster care with colleagues in Fairbanks, Alaska. 

Leigh Stearns

Professor, Graduate Chair Penn Arts & Sciences, Dept of Earth & Environmental Science

Leigh Sterns, PhD, is interested in how a changing climate impacts the cryosphere, and the risks associated with those changes. Her current research focuses on ice sheet dynamics and sea level rise, shifts in iceberg and sea ice distributions in Arctic shipping lanes, and glacier loss and water availability at low latitudes. She relies on a combination of satellite remote sensing, machine learning, and geophysical instrumentation to better understand these systems and parameterize their changes into numerical models.

Michael Weisberg

Bess W. Heyman President's Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Deputy Director of Perry World House School of Arts and Sciences

A climate diplomat, philosopher of science, climate policy researcher, and experienced academic leader, he has worked to negotiate and achieve collective outcomes in the complex landscape of climate, ocean, and development issues at the highest levels of international diplomacy.

An expert on the climate needs of small island developing states, Weisberg currently serves as senior advisor to Jamaica's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and as an advisor to the Fiji and Palau negotiating teams at COP. Weisberg was a leading voice in the development of the "mosaic of solutions" for addressing loss and damage due to the adverse impacts of climate change, which led to major breakthroughs on the topic at COP27 and COP28. This framework was developed in collaboration with the Maldivian Government and the International Peace Institute, where he is a Non-resident Senior Advisor. 

Weisberg serves as editor-in-chief of Biology and Philosophy and director of the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance. He is the author of Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World, co-author of the landmark photographic study Galápagos: Life in Motion, and a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jennifer Wilcox

School of Engineering and Applied Science, Kleinman Center for Energy Policy Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy

Jennifer Wilcox is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, with a home at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. At Penn, she oversees the Clean Energy Conversions Lab.

Wilcox is also a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, where she leverages her expertise to help accelerate policy support and investments in research, development, and deployment of industrial decarbonization and carbon removal solutions in order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. 

Most recently, Wilcox served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the Department of Energy. Before coming to Penn, she was the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Robert Habeck

Perry World House Distinguished Global Leader Fellow, former Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection of the Federal Republic of Germany