Richard Lindzen

Richard S. Lindzen is an emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, where he was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor, beginning in 1983. Prior to that he was the Robert P. Burden Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. He is also currently a distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science.

Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Jule Charney award for “highly significant research” in the atmospheric sciences from the American Meteorological Society and the Distinguished Engineering Achievement Award from the Engineer’s Council in 2009.

His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other, and has developed models for the earth’s climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate.