Robert Socolow

Professor Emeritus and Lecturer, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

Robert Socolow is Professor Emeritus and Lecturer, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. Rob earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in theoretical high-energy physics in 1964, was an assistant professor of physics at Yale University from l966 to l97l, and joined the Princeton University faculty in 1971 with the assignment of inventing interdisciplinary environmental research.

Rob is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

From 2000 to 2019, Rob and Steve Pacala were the co-principal investigator of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, www.princeton.edu/~cmi/, a twenty-five-year (2001-2025) project supported by BP. His best-known paper, with Pacala, was in Science (2004): "Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies." Rob was a member of the Grand Challenges for Engineering Committee of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academies Committees on America's Climate Choices and on America’s Energy Future. He was the editor of Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 1992-2002, and was on the Board of the National Audubon Society, 1992-99.

From 2013 to 2019 Rob led the “distillate” project at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, http://acee.princeton.edu/distillates/, which has produced monographs on wind power, solar power, nuclear fusion, small modular nuclear fission reactors, and grid-scale storage of electricity. Rob also co-chaired the 2011 American Physical Society technology assessment, “Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals.”

Rob’s retirement celebration (a dinner and day-long symposium) has been archived at https://environment.princeton.edu/destiny-studies.