Cutler J Cleveland

Cutler J. Cleveland is Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University. He also is a Senior Fellow at the National Council for Science and the Environment in Washington D.C., where he serves on the Executive Board of the Council of Energy Research and Education Leaders (CEREL). Dr. Cleveland is Chief Education Officer at Trunity, Inc., a leading global provider of living virtual digital textbooks and eLearning solutions.

Dr. Cleveland is author and editor of acclaimed reference works on energy that include the Encyclopedia of Energy (Elsevier, 2004), winner of an American Library Association award, the Dictionary of Energy (Elsevier, 2005), the Concise Encyclopedia of the History of Energy, the Handbook of Energy (Elsevier, 2013), and Energy and Climate Change: A Primer (Trunity, 2013). He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Earth, named the Best Geoscience Website by the Geoscience Information Society. Dr. Cleveland is the recipient of the Adelman-Frankel Award from the United States Association of Energy Economics for “unique and innovative contributions to the field of energy economics.” He is co-author of Environmental Science, the Web’s first entirely electronic introductory textbook on the subject. Dr. Cleveland’s research on the valuation of ecosystem services, funded by the National Science Foundation, is highlighted in NSF’s Top Discoveries series. Dr. Cleveland has been a consultant to numerous private and public organizations, including the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, Charles River Associates, the Energy Information Administration, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Cleveland holds a B.S. in Ecology from Cornell University, a M.S. in Marine Science from Louisiana State University, and a Ph. D. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His research interests span the interconnections among energy, society and the environment. He has a long-standing interest in integrative, interdisciplinary reference work related to to energy. He studies energy transitions, particularly significant changes to the patterns of energy supply and/or energy use in a society that are accompanied by transformative cultural, economic, demographic, technological and environmental changes. He is also interested in the net energy and life cycle analysis of conventional and alternative energy systems.