Michael Mann
Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, began his tenure as Penn’s inaugural Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action on November 1, 2024.
He is a globally renowned scholar of climate science whose many honors include the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union, Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education, and John Scott Award from the City of Philadelphia. Elected to the Royal Society in 2024 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, he has been named one of the world’s most influential people in climate policy, one of the 10 most influential earth scientists, one of the top influencers in sustainability, and one of the 50 scientists who are changing the way we see the world.
Mann is an author and/or editor of six award-winning books and hundreds of publications across popular and scholarly media, including most recently Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis (Public Affairs/Hachette, 2023), named one of the best books of the year by Financial Times; the widely acclaimed and influential The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (Public Affairs/ Hachette, 2021), named one of the 20 Best Sustainability Books of All Time and to numerous other best books lists; and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Columbia University Press, 2012), based on his landmark contributions to the 2001 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which included the now-famous “hockey stick” chart documenting the rise in global temperatures during the past thousand years.
He came to Penn in 2022 from Penn State University, where he was Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and director of the Earth System Science Center. He taught at Penn State from 2005 to 2022, following earlier positions at the University of Virginia and University of Massachusetts and an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Department of Energy. He received a PhD in Geology and Geophysics and MS in Physics from Yale University and an AB in Applied Math and Physics from the University of California at Berkeley.