Chris Field

Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Biology Department of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a Professor of Earth System Science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a Senior Fellow at Woods Institute as well as the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy.  Field assumed leadership of the Woods Institute in September 2016.

Prior to his appointment as Woods’ director, Field served as Director of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology, which he founded in 2002. Field’s tenure at the Carnegie Institution dates back to 1984. He was also Director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

Field’s research focuses on climate change, ranging from work on improving climate models to prospects for renewable energy systems and community organizations that can minimize the risk of a tragedy of the commons. He has been deeply involved with national- and international-scale efforts to advance science and assessment related to global ecology and climate change. He served as co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2008 to 2015, where he led the effort behind a special report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” (2012), and the working group’s contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability(2014).  His widely cited work has earned many recognitions, including election to the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Max Planck Research Award, and the Roger Revelle Medal. Field is a member of the Board of Directors of World Wildlife Fund (US) and the Board of Trustees of the California Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Ecological Society of America.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford.