Donald J. Wuebbles

Donald J. Wuebbles is a distinguished research scientist at the Discovery Partners Institute and  emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois. He is also director of climate science for Earth Knowledge Inc., a company that provides data-derived insights on climate and weather. From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Wuebbles was assistant director with the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the Executive Office of the President. After many years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. Wuebbles came to the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as professor and head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in 1994. He also led the development of the School of Earth, Society and Environment at the university and was its first director. An expert in atmospheric physics and chemistry, with over 500 scientific publications related to the Earth’s climate, air quality and stratospheric ozone, he also provides analyses and development of metrics for translating science to policy and societal responses. He has been a leader in many international and national scientific assessments, including a coordinating lead author on international climate assessments led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), thus contributing to IPCC being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He co-led Volume 1 of the 2017 4th U.S. National Climate Assessment. Amongst his major awards, Dr. Wuebbles has received the Cleveland Abbe Award from the American Meteorological Society, the Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Bert Bolin Global Environmental Change Award from the American Geophysical Union. He is a fellow of three major professional science societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He was a member of the joint U.S. National Academy of Science and UK Royal Society Committee on Climate Change that wrote Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2104 and updated it in 2020. He led special assessments of climate change and its impacts on the Great Lakes region, and on Illinois in 2019 and 2021, respectively. He also coauthored the 2021 Climate Action Plan for the Chicago Region. In 2022, he chaired a committee for the National Academy of Sciences that wrote a special report on a framework for greenhouse gas emissions inventories being used in consideration of policies to reduce the emissions affecting climate change.

Research Interests