John Harte
Professor of Energy & Resources
University of California at Berkeley

John Harte holds a joint professorship in the Energy and Resources Group and the Ecosystem Sciences Division of the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. He received a BA in physics from Harvard University in 1961 and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1965. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at CERN, Geneva, during 1965-66 and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, during 1966-68. During the next 5 years, he was Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University and has been at Berkeley since 1973. Harte is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and in 1990 was awarded a Pew Scholars Prize in Conservation and the Environment. In 1993 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected to the California Academy of Sciences. In 1998 he was appointed a Phi Beta Kappa Distinguished Lecturer and a Distinguished Ecologist Lecturer at Colorado State University. He is the 2001 recipient of the Leo Szilard prize from the American Physical Society, and has served on six National Academy of Sciences Committees. He has authored over 180 scientific publications, including six books, on topics including biodiversity, climate change, biogeochemistry, energy and water resources, and, long ago, elementary particle physics. Harte’s current research focuses on the applications of physical principles to ecology, with a focus on i. the abundance and distribution of species across multiple spatial and temporal scales and ii. feedback interactions between climate and ecosystems.