Steven Koonin, a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, authored the recent bestseller Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. He has previously served as Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (2009-2011), as Chief Scientist for BP (2004-2009) moving the firm into renewable energy, and as a professor at Caltech (1975 – 2004, the last nine years as the Institute’s Vice President and Provost). Koonin is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the JASON group of government advisors, as well as an Independent Governor of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, having served in similar capacities for the Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Laboratories. Other prior roles include a University Professor at NYU, a non-resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses.
Koonin has a BS in Physics from Caltech and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT. He is the author of the classic 1985 textbook Computational Physics and has published some 200 peer-reviewed papers in physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science.