Thomas C. Heller has served as CPI’s Executive Director since the organization’s start in September 2009.  Before joining CPI, Heller was a professor at Stanford University for thirty years, serving as the Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. An expert in law, economic development, and the performance of legal institutions, Professor Heller has focused his research on the rule of law, international climate control, global energy use, and the interaction of government and nongovernmental organizations in establishing legal structures in the developing world.  Since 1991, Heller has been increasingly engaged in research and applied policy studies in energy and climate, with a principal concern with developments in China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and other leading emerging markets. He was a contributing lead author for the IPCC on the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, as well as a contributor to the Special Reports on Technology Transfer and Emissions Scenarios. Professor Heller has a B.A. from Princeton University and an L.L.B. from Yale Law School.

George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1985 and since then has held academic positions at The University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University, and fellowships at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, The Russell Sage Foundation and The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He is one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics and more recently of the field of neuroeconomics. He is past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Loewenstein’s research focuses on applications of psychology to economics, and his specific interests include decision making over time, bargaining and negotiations, law and economics and the role of emotion in decision making.

M. Granger Morgan is Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where he is also University and Lord Chair Professor in Engineering. In addition, he holds academic appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the H. John Heinz III College. His research addresses problems in science, technology and public policy with a particular focus on energy, environmental systems, climate change and risk analysis. Much of his work has involved the development and demonstration of methods to characterize and treat uncertainty in quantitative policy analysis. At Carnegie Mellon, Morgan directs the NSF Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making and is Deputy Director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. Morgan serves as Chair of the Scientific and Technical Council for the International Risk Governance Council. In the recent past, he served as Chair of the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and as Chair of the Advisory Council of the Electric Power Research Institute, of which he is now again a member. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the AAAS, the IEEE, and the Society for Risk Analysis. He holds a BA from Harvard College (1963) where he concentrated in Physics, an MS in Astronomy and Space Science from Cornell (1965) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Physics and Information Sciences at the University of California at San Diego (1969).

Doug Rivers is one of the world’s leading experts on survey research and a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He has taught at Harvard University, Caltech, UCLA, and, most recently, Stanford University, where he is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research fellow with the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, a CBS News consultant and Chief Innovations Officer of YouGov PLC, which operates an online panel of over 2.5 million respondents worldwide and a joint public opinion poll with The Economist. Rivers was founder and CEO of three successful technology companies, including two pioneers of online market research — Polimetrix (2004) and Knowledge Networks (1998). Polimetrix was acquired by YouGov PLC and now operates under that brand. Knowledge Networks, a provider of probability-based digital research solutions, is now a part of the GfK Group. Most of Rivers' academic research has been on the application of statistics to political science and economics. He has also done pioneering work on simultaneous probit models, causal inference in social experiments and model selection for time series published in the American Political Science Review, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Econometrics. He received the Innovators Award from American Association of Public Opinion Research in 2001. Rivers holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Roberto Weber heads the Chair for Behavioral Economics at the University of Zurich. Described broadly, Weber’s research consists of behavioral and experimental studies of decision-making in economic and organizational contexts, frequently using economic games to study interaction. His work lies at the intersection of economics, game theory, organizational behavior, business strategy, and political science; he has published research in leading journals in these areas. Prior to joining the University of Zurich in 2011, Weber was Professor in the Department of Social & Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and was affiliated with the Tepper School of Business, the Center for Behavioral Decision Research (CBDR), and the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory (PEEL). Professor Weber has a Ph.D from California Institute of Technology.

Guillaume Wright is a Publisher at IOP Publishing (after joining the company in 2009), a society Publisher wholly owned by the UK Institute of Physics. His responsibilities are primarily for two of the companies environmental products, the open access primary research journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) and it’s sister news and opinion website environmentalresearchweb, both aiming to serve the environmental science community. He oversees the day-to-day management of ERL, including peer-review, promotional activities, open access publishing issues, and journal strategy and development, as well as coordination and editorial development on environmentalresearchweb. Wright holds a MPhys in Physics from the University of Oxford.

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Ph.D., is Professor of Behavioural Decision Making at the Leeds University Business School (UK), as well as Associate Professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and Adjunct Decision Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her research interests include the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well as risk perception and communication. Her research aims to understand how people make decisions about the risks that they face, and to develop communications aiming to improve those decisions. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, and involves collaborations with engineers, public health experts, and economists. She has published in peer-reviewed journals in multiple disciplines, including psychology, environmental science, economics, and public health. She has contributed her expertise to advisory panels and workshops organized by the Centers of Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Research Council.

Peter Kriss completed his Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012, and is a lead research scientist at Medallia, a survey research firm. He studies behavioral decision making, behavioral economics and management, with a focus on the role of communication in promoting “good” social ends, such as mutually beneficial economic relationships, agreement over conflict, efficient coordination, and fair and ethical behavior. He has an M.S. in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon and a B.A. in mathematics with minors in philosophy and psychology from Swarthmore College.

Mark Kriss is an information technology entrepreneur and researcher, whose current focus is scientific opinion polling and risk communication about climate change. His prior start-ups, in media and technology, were acquired by Dow Jones, Cisco, Exodus Communications, Primedia and Broderbund. Mark’s fascination with real-world information markets dates from the mid-1980s when he spent five years working with some of the world’s leading currency traders as a part of a successful software venture he co-founded. In 1993, he co-founded one of the first commercial Internet companies, with financial backing from Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a leading private equity firm. Earlier in his career, Mark held senior positions in technology research at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) and Yankee Group. He served as a mentor in the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1995 to 2008. Adapting investment portfolios to climate and carbon risks is a current area of research, in the context of Macroclimate LLC, an asset management firm he founded in 2004. Mark has a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and M.A. in communication research from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Jesse Kriss is an expert on data visualization, web technology, and user interface design, and has been designing and implementing web-based interfaces and systems since 1997. In 2005, he joined IBM Research as one of the initial members of Martin Wattenberg’s Visual Communication Lab (VCL) prototyping interactive information visualization systems. During his five-year tenure at the VCL, he served as lead developer for Many Eyes, a collaborative visualization tool that allows users to gather data, visualize it, and discuss their visualizations, as well as the Visualization Lab for The New York Times. Since IBM, Jesse has worked as a independent consultant in the areas of web development, human-computer interaction, and information visualization for a range of clients, including Stanford University and Figure 53. He is currently Senior Design Lead in the Human Interfaces Group at NASA/JPL. Jesse has a B.A. in music from Carleton College and Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.