CMU's Ines Lima Azevedo Will Lead New Center To Develop Strategies Improving Climate and Energy Decision Making
December 7, 2010
Contact: Chriss Swaney
Carnegie Mellon University
412.268.5776
PITTSBURGH—Uncertainty is a part of life. But a new center at Carnegie Mellon University will help consumers and industry better handle those doubts when it comes to issues involving global climate change and energy.
The Center for
Climate and Energy Decision Making,
funded by a five-year, $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation,
will develop and implement strategies for protecting everything from fragile
marine ecosystems to curbing dangerous carbon dioxide emissions from
electricity generation.
"We plan to develop new, innovative insights and methods to assist key stakeholders as they address important decisions involving climate change and the ongoing transformation of the world's critical energy systems," said Ines Lima Azevedo, the center's executive director and an assistant research professor in the university's Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP). "At the same time, we'll also be developing new theories and methods for supporting decision making under uncertainty."
The new center
also will tap the expertise of principal investigator M. Granger Morgan, head
of CMU's EPP Department, and several other Carnegie Mellon faculty as well as
researchers from the following institutions: Duke University, Oxford,
University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, the University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, Woods Hole Institute, Penn State,
the Vermont Law School, George Mason University and the Rand Corp in both
Pittsburgh and Santa Monica, Calif.
"This new center will help educate graduate students interested in developing careers spanning the issues and areas of climate change, the environment and energy," said Morgan, who has spent more than a decade developing methods to describe scientific uncertainty and incorporate it into public policy decision-making.
Other plans for outreach include the development of a Teacher Professional Development Program for high school teachers, dubbed "Climate Science, Impacts and Decision Making."