Discovery Park welcoming NYU’s Steven Koonin as speaker

Steven Koonin, professor of physics and founding director of the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, will speak April 16 on the future of energy and climate as one of the events of Purdue's sesquicentennial celebration, 150 Years of Giant Leaps.  

Koonin’s talk, “Certainties and Uncertainties in our Energy and Climate Futures,” will begin at 11 a.m. at the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entreprenuership, Room 121. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is presented by Discovery Park as part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series. A livestream link to the lecture is available here.

Science, technology, economics, policy, behavior and values are all pieces of the energy-climate nexus puzzle. Koonin will explore this topic by separating the “what is” from “what will, could, or should be” and by presenting the certainties and uncertainties in our understanding of the earth’s changing climate and its response to human influences. Next century’s projections, climate models and the historical record will be explored in novel ways not usually covered in policy-informing summaries. A discussion of reducing human influences and adapting to climate change will close out the session.

Before joining NYU, Koonin served as the second undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama, where he oversaw technical activities across the department’s science, energy, and security activities, and led the department’s first Quadrennial Technology Review for energy. Koonin holds a BS in physics from Caltech and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT.

The Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by the Lilly Endowment as a mechanism for Purdue and Discovery Park to bring to campus the latest thinking about science and technology and other broad areas of public interest.

Writer:  Elizabeth Harwood, eharwood@purdue.edu