John Reilly

Dr. Reilly is a Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management and served as Co-Director of the Joint Program from 2010 through August 2020. As an energy, environmental and agricultural economist, he is focused on understanding the contribution of human activities to global environmental change and the effects of environmental change on the economy and society. A key element of his work is the integration of models of the global economy (representing human activity) with models of the ocean, atmosphere and terrestrial vegetation. The main goal of this integrated approach is to enable the design of policies that can effectively limit the contribution of human activity to environmental change, to facilitate adaptation to unavoidable change, and to understand the consequences of the deployment of large-scale energy systems that will be needed to meet growing energy needs.

Centered on the integrated assessment of climate change, Dr. Reilly’s work is published in more than 150 articles, reports and volume chapters. He has served in multiple capacities on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was the Co-Chair of the US National Agricultural Assessment on Climate Variability and Change, served on early committees in the Federal government that shaped the direction of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and participated in a wide range of other advisory committees.

Prior to joining MIT in 1998, Dr. Reilly spent 15 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and previously for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Institute for Energy Analysis, Oak Ridge Associated Universities. He holds PhD (1983) and MS (1980) degrees in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS (1978) degree from the University of Wisconsin.