Clark garners Humboldt Research Award

William Clark, Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development at the Kennedy School of Government, has been awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award 2002. As part of his award, Clark will undertake a series of stays at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany beginning this July.

The Humboldt Research Award is given by the Humboldt Foundation to outstanding scholars residing outside Germany as a lifelong tribute to past academic accomplishments. In his work, Clark renews the integrative approach to science pioneered by Alexander von Humboldt. He has studied the increasing impact of humankind on the Earth system and the array of human responses to those impacts. Clark is widely recognized for helping to develop a vision for the coming decades: the historical perspective of a sustainability transition.

“My research has been conducted almost entirely in the context of international, interdisciplinary team efforts to address the challenges of environmentally sustainable human development,” Clark said. “This award from the Humboldt Foundation is particularly gratifying as a recognition of the growing importance of such collaborative approaches.”

Clark is a member of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the University’s Center for the Environment. Trained as an ecologist, he now works on the linkages between global environmental change and economic development, policy analysis for resource and environmental management, and understanding the use of incomplete scientific knowledge in decision making. Before joining the school in 1987, Clark led the program on sustainable development of the biosphere at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Clark is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize and the Kennedy School’s Manuel Carballo Teaching Award.