Daniel Kammen
Visiting Scholar
2019-2020
Daniel Kammen was a 2019-2020 visiting scholar at the Kleinman Center and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), and was also the director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center.
Under Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, he was the first energy fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative. He began service as the science envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016, but resigned in 2017 over President Trump’s policies. He has served the State of California and U.S. federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was also the World Bank Group’s first Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency.
Before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, Kammen was an assistant professor and chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He has authored or co-authored 12 books, written more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, and has testified more than 40 times to U.S. state and federal congressional briefings, and has provided various governments with more than 50 technical reports.
Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (B.A. 1984) and Harvard (M.A. 1986; Ph.D. 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard.