Speakers Index
Global Catastrophic Risks Conference - Speakers Biographies
Professor Jonathan Wiener, William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment & Earth Sciences, and Professor of Public Policy Studies at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA)
Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment & Earth Sciences, and Professor of Public Policy Studies at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. From 2000-05 he also served as the founding Faculty Director of the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions, which has now been expanded into the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, of which he serves as Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee.
In 2008 he serves as President of the Society for Risk Analysis(SRA), the first law professor or lawyer to hold this post. In 2003 he received the Chauncey Starr Young Risk Analyst Award from the SRA for the most exceptional contributions to the field of risk analysis by a scholar aged 40 or under. Since 2002 he has been a University Fellow of Resources for the Future(RFF), the environmental economics think tank.
His visiting appointments include the University of Chicago Law School (2007), L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and le Centre International de Recherche sur L'Environnement et le Développement (CIRED) in Paris (2005-06), and Harvard Law School (1999).
Before coming to Duke, he worked on U.S. and international environmental policy at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and at the United States Department of Justice, serving in both the first Bush and Clinton administrations. He attended the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
Professor Wiener clerked for Judge (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston in 1988-89, and for Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the U.S. District Court in New York in 1987-88. He received his A.B. in Economics (1984) and his J.D. (1987) from Harvard University, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and helped coach the 1985