Katharine Hayhoe

Katharine Hayhoe is an accomplished atmospheric scientist who studies climate change and why it matters to us here and now. She is also a remarkable communicator who has received the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet award, the American Geophysical Union’s Climate Communication Prize, the Sierra Club’s Distinguished Service award, and has been named to several lists, including Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, Foreign Policy’s 100Leading Thinkers, FORTUNE magazine’s World’s Greatest Leaders and the United Nations Champion of the Earth in Science and Innovation.

Her writing has appeared in a wide range of outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, O Magazine, and Chatelaine. Her TED talk, “The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it,” has more than 4 million views. Her most recent book is “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” published by Simon & Schuster.

Hayhoe has served as lead author on the Second, Third, and Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessments and as an author on the Fifth National Climate Assessment. She also hosts and produces the PBS Digital Series "Global Weirding" and serves on advisory committees for a wide range of organizations, including UBS, Netflix, King Philanthropies, and the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.

Hayhoe serves as Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy and she is also a Paul W. Horn Distinguished Professor and the Political Science Endowed Professor in Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech University. She has a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Toronto and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Illinois, is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Academy of Arts& Sciences, the American Scientific Affiliation, and the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Colgate University, Trinity College, and Victoria University and Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.