Mark Z. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and of the Precourt Institute for Energy.
He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering, an A.B. in Economics, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford in 1988. He received an M.S. and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in 1991 and 1994, respectively, from UCLA and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1994. His career focuses on better understanding air pollution and global warming problems and developing large-scale clean, renewable energy solutions to them. He has published six textbooks and ~180 peer-reviewed journal articles. He received the 2005 American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award and the 2013 American Geophysical Union Ascent Award for his work on black carbon climate impacts and the 2013 Global Green Policy Design Award for developing state and country energy plans.
In 2015, he received a Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for his work on the grid integration of 100% wind, water and solar energy systems. In 2018, he received the Judi Friedman Lifetime Achievement Award “For a distinguished career dedicated to finding solutions to large-scale air pollution and climate problems.”
In 2019 and 2022, he was selected as “one of the world’s 100 most influential people in climate policy” by Apolitical. In 2022, he received the Visionary Clean Tech Influencer of the Year award at the World Clean Tech Awards. He is rated as one of the top 12 most impactful scientists worldwide in history from 1788 to 2021 (and the very top scientist among those first publishing after 1985) in the field of Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, based on citations to his papers, and the top 16 in the field of Energy, as well as the top 1,850 among all scientific fields, among 10 million scientists in history. He has also served on an advisory committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, appeared in a TED talk, appeared on the David Letterman Show to discuss converting the world to clean energy, and cofounded The Solutions Project nonprofit. His work is the scientific basis of the energy portion of the U.S. Green New Deal and laws to go to 100% renewable energy in cities, states, and countries worldwide.