Steven J. Davis

CURRENT

Steven J. Davis

Director, Professor of Earth System Science

Steve Davis is a Professor of Earth System Science at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute of Energy, and Director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab.

Background

Prior to his science career, Steve worked as a lawyer to venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley, and holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Florida, where he double-majored in Political Science and Philosophy.

Steve spent 11 years as a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and a year as the first Head of Science at Watershed before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2024. He has been a highly-cited researcher (top 1%) since 2019 and is well known for his work in earth system science, emissions and energy scenarios, climate impacts and solutions, and corporate climate strategy.

He and his group have published seminal papers assessing carbon emissions and air pollution impacts embodied in international trade, committed emissions related to existing energy infrastructure, the economic and biophysical limits of various carbon removal approaches, interactions among food-energy-water systems, drivers of agriculture and land-use change emissions, and the key challenges and opportunities for net-zero emissions energy systems.

Steve was a Contributing Author of two Working Group III chapters in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), serves on the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Carbon Project, was the Lead Author of the Mitigation chapter in the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment, and is an active member of the Technical Council of the Science Based Targets Initiative.

Contact

In the lab
Since 2012-10
Site
earth.stanford.edu/people/steven-davis

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