Future of Energy: Robert Socolow

April 5, 2006 – "Stabilization Wedges: Mitigation Tools for the Next Half-Century"
Robert Socolow, Professor, Princeton University; Co-Director, The Carbon Mitigation Initiative, Princeton University

Robert Socolow is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His current research focuses on global carbon management and fossil-carbon sequestration. He is the co-principal investigator (with ecologist, Stephen Pacala) of Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), a fifteen-year (2000-2015) research project supported by BP (and formerly by Ford). Under CMI, Princeton has launched new, coordinated research in environmental science, energy technology, geological engineering, and public policy.

Pacala and Socolow are the authors of "Stabilization wedges: Solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies" (Science, August 13, 2004). Socolow recently served on two committees of the National Academies: "America's Energy Future" and "America's Climate Choices." He was a member of the Grand Challenges for Engineering Committee of the National Academy of Engineering. He was the editor of Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 1992-2002.

Socolow received a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics in l964 from Harvard University. He was an assistant professor of physics at Yale University from l966 to l97l. He was awarded the 2003 Leo Szilard Lectureship Award by the American Physical Society: "For leadership in establishing energy and environmental problems as legitimate research fields for physicists, and for demonstrating that these broadly defined problems can be addressed with the highest scientific standards."