Michael MacCracken: Difference between revisions

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He was born in [[Schenectady]], New York, graduated from Tenafly High School in 1960, received his B.S. in Engineering degree from Princeton University in 1964 and his Ph.D. Applied Science from the [[University of California Davis]]/Livermore in 1968. His dissertation involved development and application of an early global [[climate model]] to analyze the plausibility of then current hypotheses for the causes of [[ice age]] cycling.

==Academic research==

From 1968-1993, Dr. MacCracken’s research at the [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]] focused on development and application of numerical models to study of [[global warming|climate change]] (including study of the potential climatic effects of [[greenhouse gases]], [[volcanic aerosols]], land-cover change, and [[nuclear winter|nuclear war]] and factors affecting air quality (including [[photochemical pollution]] in the [[San Francisco Bay Area]].

==Positions held==

In addition to his research, Dr. MacCracken served as projectProject director (1976-1979) of the [[Department of Energy]]’s Multistate Atmospheric Power Production Pollution Study, which focused on [[acid precipitation]] in the northeastern US, and was a program adviser (1979-93) for various components of DOE’s Carbon Dioxide Research Program, including serving as lead editor of two volumes of DOE’s 1985 assessments on climate change. From 1984-1990, he served as US co-chair of Project 02.08–11 under Working Group VIII of the US/USSR Joint Committee on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection. At LLNL, he served as deputy division leader for atmospheric and geophysical sciences from 1974-1987 and division leader from 1974-1987.

From 1993-2002, Dr. MacCracken was on assignment from LLNL to the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in Washington D.C., as senior global change scientist. With the Office, he served as its first executive director from 1993-1997 and as executive director of the National Assessment Coordination Office from 1997-2001, coordinating preparation of the first comprehensive national assessment of climate change impacts on the US [16,17]. During this assignment, Dr. MacCracken also served as a co-author/contributing author for various chapters in the assessment reports of the [[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]] (IPCC), as well as coordinating preparation of the official U.S. Government reviews of the Second and [[Third IPCC Assessment Report]]s. He also served as president of the International Commission on Climate from 1995-2003 and co-editor of volume 1 of the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change.