Meet The Team Tuesdays: Jacob Haqq-Misra

This post is the first in what will be a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

I was introduced to Jacob in 2008 via our mutual friend Shawn Domagal-Goldman when the three of us were grad students at Penn State. Shawn and Jacob were part of Penn State’s Astrobiology Research Center. They were thinking a lot about the implications of astrobiology (the study of life in the universe) for human civilization today, and invited me to join the conversation. The conversation has resulted in several papers together …

Read More »

New Blogs & Newsfeeds Resource

GCRI is pleased to announce the publication of its newest resource for the global catastrophic risk community, a compilation of blogs and newsfeeds. The resource features 36 blogs and 18 newsfeeds, each with an annotation describing the blog/newsfeed.

The blogs and newsfeeds presented here cover a wide range of GCR topics. Most cover specific risks such as nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, or emerging technologies. Some cover cross-cutting topics such as law, uncertainty, and preparedness. They also come from a wide range of sources, including academia, …

Read More »

October 2012 Newsletter

GCRI just sent out the first run of its monthly email newsletter. The main updates are reprinted below. To sign up for our newsletter, click here.

GCRI Launches New Website

Our website, gcrinstitute.org, has been completely redesigned. The site was designed in WordPress by Melissa Thomas. The new look features most of the previous site’s content, plus a new blog. We’ll be blogging regularly about GCRI and the broader theme of global catastrophic risk. Keep tuned in, and feel free to leave us a comment!

GCRI Launches New …

Read More »

GCRI Hosts Discussion Of Religion & GCR

On Friday 28 September 2012, GCRI hosted the first of what looks to be an ongoing series of discussions among a group of religion scholars. The discussion covered several topics, including an extended discussion of the inevitability of catastrophe.

Meeting participants included Hassan Hussain of UCLA & Columbia University, Jun Zhuang of University at Buffalo, and Seth Baum, Tony Barrett, Mark Fusco, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, all of GCRI.

The group observed that some religious communities view catastrophe as inevitable, such as in ideas about apocalypse. These communities …

Read More »

GCRI Hosts Discussion Of Nuclear War

On Thursday 27 September 2012, GCRI hosted the first of what looks to be an ongoing series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. The discussion covered several nuclear war topics, including an extended discussion of nuclear winter.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford, James Scouras of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Seth Baum, Tony Barrett, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Tim Maher, all of GCRI.

The group considered an observation that the United States government has not been as active as it …

Read More »

Welcome To The New GCRI Website & Blog

We are excited to have this new look for the organization as it continues to grow. The structure and content of the website is, for the moment, largely the same, except we now have this blog. However, we’ll be adding new content soon – stay tuned!

Big thanks go to everyone who helped make this happen. The website design and development was lead by Melissa Thomas. James Evans of Knightsbridge Online helped get the site running on our server.

Read More »