News & Announcements

The American Energy Society has named the Belfer Center’s Meghan O’Sullivan the 2017 “Energy Writer of the Year.” O’Sullivan, the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Belfer Center's Geopolitics of Energy Project, received the prestigious award for her recently published book Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power and for her New York Times commentary “How Trump Can Harness the U.S. Energy Boom.”

Former Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is joining Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a Senior Fellow, the Center announced today. Sherwood-Randall, who has served in the White House and Departments of Energy and Defense, is returning to the Center where she worked in the 1990s to help establish two pioneering projects – the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project with Graham Allison, who this month stepped down as the Center’s director, and the Preventive Defense Project with Ash Carter, the former Secretary of Defense who is the new Belfer Center director.

Cambridge, MA – The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has named Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Director of the Center for the Environment at Harvard University, to lead its Science, Technology, and Public Policy program. STPP, one of Harvard's most collaborative and cross-disciplinary programs, is renowned world-wide for its cutting-edge research on technology innovation, nuclear non-proliferation and safety, climate science and policy, cybersecurity, and globalization and development.

On April 28, the Project on Managing the Atom joined the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, The Netherlands government, and the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) in convening nuclear nonproliferation experts from around the world at the United Nations to participate in a Symposium on the 2015 Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.

Daniel Poneman, former Deputy Secretary of Energy, has joined Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a senior fellow.

Poneman was nominated by President Obama to be Deputy Secretary of Energy on April 20, 2009, and was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 18, 2009. Under the leadership of Secretaries of Energy Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz, Poneman also served as Chief Operating Officer of the Department. Between April 23, 2013, and May 21, 2013, Poneman served as Acting Secretary of Energy.

The outgoing EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht delivered an address entitled “Trade and Geopolitics: T-TIP, Ukraine and beyond” and led a discussion with students and experts on September 11. Commissioner de Gucht discussed some of the major political obstacles for European member states in balancing protectionist policy with mutually beneficial objectives.

David H. Petraeus, a retired four-star Army general and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has been appointed a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

On Monday April 9, the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) hosted a screening and discussion of Hefner’s latest project, a documentary titled “The Grand Energy Transition: Natural Gas – The Bridge To Our Sustainable Future.” Excerpts from the film were shown at the Kennedy School to an audience including Belfer Center Director Graham Allison and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Joseph S. Nye.

(See link below for audio podcast of the event)

The U.S. government could save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year by 2050 by spending a few billion dollars more a year to spur innovations in energy technology, according to a new report by researchers at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The three-year project by the Belfer Center's Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group calls for doubling investment and adopting policy changes in energy technology.

The report, Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation, released on Nov. 22, 2011,is the result of a three-year energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) project of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy (ETIP) research group at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The ERD3 project was funded by a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to produce and promote a comprehensive set of recommendations to help the U.S. administration accelerate the development and deployment of low-carbon energy technologies.