Program Director, The Rockefeller University and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Jesse H. Ausubel is Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York City, where he oversees a research program that elaborates the technical vision of a large prosperous society that emits little or nothing harmful and spares large amounts of land and sea for nature.

From 1977-1988, Mr. Ausubel worked for the US National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. He was one of the main organizers of the first UN World Climate Conference (Geneva, 1979), which substantially elevated the global warming issue on scientific and political agendas and played major roles in the formulation of both the U.S. and world climate research programs.

Mr. Ausubel has authored and edited more than 150 articles, reports, and books, including Changing Climate (National Academy, 1983), the first comprehensive review of the greenhouse effect, and Toward an International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), the 1983 Research Council report originating the Global Change Program.

Since 1994 Mr. Ausubel has served concurrently as a Program Director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, helping bring into existence a major new international program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans, the Census of Marine Life. For Sloan he also helped to create the Barcode of Life Initiative to build a library of short sequences of DNA for quick, reliable, inexpensive identification of species of animals and plants. The Consortium for the Barcode of Life now involves more than 130 institutions in 40 countries.

Educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities, Mr. Ausubel serves on several editorial boards, including The Journal of Industrial Ecology, and is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future and an adjunct faculty member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), he has led CFR activities on energy and on forests.

At the invitation of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in January 2006, Mr. Ausubel began feasibility studies of the Encyclopedia of Life and has served as chair of the planning group and now its steering committee.