1.5* Minute Faculty Climate Lectures

Guy Grossman, PhD, the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations at the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is in applied political economy, with a substantive focus on governance, migration and forced displacement, human trafficking, and conflict processes, (mostly) in the context of developing countries. Grossman is the the founder and co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab), launched in 2020. At Penn, he is also a Faculty Affiliate at The Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration Study (CSERI), a member of Wharton’s Lauder Graduate Group in International Studies, and an advisory board member of the Penn Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics.

Leigh Sterns, PhD, is interested in how a changing climate impacts the cryosphere, and the risks associated with those changes. Her current research focuses on ice sheet dynamics and sea level rise, shifts in iceberg and sea ice distributions in Arctic shipping lanes, and glacier loss and water availability at low latitudes. She relies on a combination of satellite remote sensing, machine learning, and geophysical instrumentation to better understand these systems and parameterize their changes into numerical models.

A climate diplomat, philosopher of science, climate policy researcher, and experienced academic leader, he has worked to negotiate and achieve collective outcomes in the complex landscape of climate, ocean, and development issues at the highest levels of international diplomacy.

An expert on the climate needs of small island developing states, Weisberg currently serves as senior advisor to Jamaica's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and as an advisor to the Fiji and Palau negotiating teams at COP. Weisberg was a leading voice in the development of the "mosaic of solutions" for addressing loss and damage due to the adverse impacts of climate change, which led to major breakthroughs on the topic at COP27 and COP28. This framework was developed in collaboration with the Maldivian Government and the International Peace Institute, where he is a Non-resident Senior Advisor. 

Weisberg serves as editor-in-chief of Biology and Philosophy and director of the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance. He is the author of Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World, co-author of the landmark photographic study Galápagos: Life in Motion, and a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dorit Aviv, PhD, AIA is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where she directs the Thermal Architecture Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory focused on the intersection of thermodynamics, architectural design, and material science. Her work examines how architectural materials and forms can impact airflows, energy interactions, and human health. She is a licensed architect and holds a PhD in architectural technology from Princeton University. Her current projects include a distributed environmental sensing network, development of radiative cooling for hot-humid climates, a combined evaporative and radiative cooling prototype for desert climate, and indoor environmental quality control and assessment technologies.

Stephen Decina, PhD, is the Executive Director of Penn Climate, Penn's whole-of-campus effort to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. He has had a varied and expansive career, which started as a middle school science teacher in Newark, New Jersey - still the most impactful and important work he has ever done. He got a PhD in biogeochemistry at Boston University and just left his work in the U.S. Department of State where he negotiated environmental agreements at the G7, G20, and the United Nations to come to Penn. He is deeply committed to building community, engaging and mentoring youth, spending as much time in nature as possible, and to being a dad to his two-year old. He recently acquired land and an old stone ruin in his family's ancestral town in Italy which he hopes to rehabilitate using traditional skills and regenerative agriculture.

Jennifer Wilcox is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, with a home at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. At Penn, she oversees the Clean Energy Conversions Lab.

Wilcox is also a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, where she leverages her expertise to help accelerate policy support and investments in research, development, and deployment of industrial decarbonization and carbon removal solutions in order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. 

Most recently, Wilcox served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the Department of Energy. Before coming to Penn, she was the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Dr. Robert Habeck has been Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection since December 8, 2021. 

Member of the Bundestag since 2021 

2018 – 2022 Party Chairman of Alliance 90/The Greens 

2017 – 2018 Deputy Minister-President and Minister for Energy Transition, Agriculture, Environment, Nature Conservation and Digitalization of the State of Schleswig-Holstein 

2012 – 2017 Deputy Minister-President and Minister for Energy Transition, Agriculture, Environment and Rural Areas of the State of Schleswig-Holstein 

2009 – 2012 Group Chairman in the State Parliament of Schleswig-Holstein 

2008 – 2009 Group Chairman in the District Council of Schleswig-Flensburg 2004 – 2009 State Chairman of Alliance 90/The Greens in Schleswig-Holstein 

2002 – 2004 District Chairman of Alliance 90/The Greens in Schleswig-Flensburg Member of Alliance 90/The Greens   

Worked as a freelance writer 2000 Doctorate from the University of Hamburg 

1991 to 1996 Studied in Freiburg im Breisgau (German Studies, Philosophy, and Philology), Roskilde, Denmark (Humanities), and Hamburg (Literature and Philosophy), receiving a Master’s degree. 

He is married and has four children. 

Simon is the Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor, Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies, and chair of the Climate Week at Penn planning team. Simon's teaching and research focus on cultural aspects of resilience, climate adaptation and sustainability, especially with regard to water and forests, and take the climate emergency as their starting point. Recently, Simon has been a member of international design teams working on climate adaptation projects in Semarang, Indonesia, and Amsterdam.