John P. Holdren

John P. Holdren served as President Obama’s science advisor and the Senate-confirmed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from early 2009 until January 2017. He was at Harvard University from 1996 to 2008 and was re-appointed to his current positions there in February 2017. Holdren is also senior advisor to the director at the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center, which he directed from 2005 through 2008. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He was one of the first winners of a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship (1981) and is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2006-07). From 1973 to 1996 he was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he co-founded and co-led the interdisciplinary graduate-degree program in energy and resources. He earned S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Stanford in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics.