Speaker Bios
Katherine Blunt
Katherine Blunt is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric and What it Means for America’s Power Grid. The book, a national bestseller, won the 2022 Golden Poppy award for nonfiction. Her coverage of PG&E, a collaboration with two colleagues, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
William Hallman
Dr. William K. Hallman is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. An experimental psychologist with expertise in public perceptions of risk and risk communication, the goal of his research is to help people better understand and respond to risks to human health and to the environment by making informed, ethical decisions as individuals, citizens and as policymakers. His work over the last 35 years has focused on numerous issues concerning health, food, technology, and the environment directly connected to climate change, including food safety and food insecurity, foodborne illness outbreaks, infectious diseases, air quality, coastal storm warnings, and many other topics. His most recent work examines public perceptions of new food and agricultural technologies, including advances in aquaculture, gene editing, and the production of cell-cultured meat, poultry, and seafood.
Dr. Hallman is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an elected Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Climate Crossroads Advisory Committee, the successor to the Climate Communications Initiative, which he co-Chaired. He has also served as the Director of the Rutgers Food Policy Institute, Chair of the FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee, and as a U.S. Delegate to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Food Safety Cooperation Forum. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, abstracts, and monographs, including contributing to Communicating Science Effectively, A Research Agenda, published by NASEM, which has been downloaded more than 41,000 times.
Benjamin Santer
Ben Santer is an atmospheric scientist. He recently retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He is now a Fowler Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering. He studies natural and human “fingerprints” in observed climate records. His early research contributed to the historic 1995 conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. He served as lead author of a key chapter of that report. Since 1995, Ben has identified human fingerprints in atmospheric temperature and water vapor, ocean heat content, sea surface temperature in hurricane formation regions, and many other climate variables.
Julia Watson
Julia Watson is an Australian born author, researcher, lecturer, and landscape designer based in New York City. Watson is an expert on traditional and indigenous technologies and focuses her work at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and innovation. Her eponymously named design consultancy foregrounds traditional knowledge, sustainability and nature-based innovation.