Meet The Team Tuesdays: Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012
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Category emerging technologies, environmental change, law & policy, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

This past June, I was getting ready for a trip overseas when I get an email from a recent law school graduate interested in global catastrophic risk and looking for career suggestions. I was immediately intrigued. Legal thinking has an important role to play in GCR, but not many people in law gravitate to GCR. (See discussion in Arden Rowell’s Meet The Team interview.) Grant was so interested in GCR that he wanted career advice …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tony Barrett

Post Date November 20, 2012
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Category meet the team Tuesdays, nuclear war

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Tony and I met at the 2010 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. I was co-chair with Vanessa Schweizer of two sessions on global catastrophic risk. Vanessa and Tony had attended Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering & Public Policy PhD program together. Tony and I both wanted to focus our careers on GCR, and started thinking about the most effective ways of doing this. We benchmarked many other organizations and concluded that there was a need for …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Arden Rowell

Post Date November 13, 2012
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Category law & policy, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Arden and I met at the 2008 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. We were both at a presentation together, I think by Cass Sunstein, with whom Arden co-authored a paper on discounting while she was a law student at the University of Chicago. I had read the paper and recognized her name on her name tag after the presentation, so she and I got to talking. The conversation has continued ever since, and I …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Jianhua Xu

Post Date November 06, 2012
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Category meet the team Tuesdays, risk analysis

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Global catastrophic risk is an inherently global issue. Likewise the study and response to GCR benefits from global collaboration. I was thus delighted when Jianhua expressed interest. Jianhua is based in Beijing, but we met in Sydney, at the 2012 World Congress on Risk, sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis. Jianhua attended the session on global catastrophic risk I chaired and approached me afterwards. Her research is excellent, spanning several aspects of risk analysis. …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tim Maher

Post Date October 31, 2012
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Category astrobiology, environmental change, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members. It’s running one day late this week. Yesterday my attention was fixed on Hurricane Sandy, which still loomed over my apartment.

It turns out that there are not many people working on both climate change policy and contact with extraterrestrials. But here at GCRI and our parent organization Blue Marble Space, well, yes, we do both, sometimes in the same study. So Tim must have been pretty surprised when he found us via web searches …

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Jacob Haqq-Misra

Post Date October 23, 2012
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Category astrobiology, environmental change, meet the team Tuesdays

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 …

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