Cutler Cleveland

Cutler J. Cleveland, Interim Director for the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) and a Professor of Earth & Environment, conducts research and teaching focused on the connection among energy, climate change, and sustainability. He is the founder of Visualizing Energy, an open-access, interdisciplinary science communication project that aims to increase actionable knowledge about a sustainable and just energy transition. He led the development of the Massachusetts Energy Explorer, a public data platform that consolidates state, regional, and federal energy data to help policymakers, municipal officials, and researchers track and inform Massachusetts’s clean energy transition. He also served as the principal investigator for Carbon Free Boston, a technical assessment of strategies to assist the City of Boston in reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.

Dr. Cleveland is author and editor of reference works on energy that include the Encyclopedia of Energy, winner of an American Library Association award; the Dictionary of Energy; and the Handbook of Energy. 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 electronic textbook on the subject. He has been a consultant to numerous private and public organizations, including the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

His proudest accomplishment is being the inaugural guest on the Energy Nerd Show.

Cleveland holds a BS in Biology from Cornell University, a MS in Marine Science from Louisiana State University, and a PhD in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.