Chris Nielsen is the executive director of the China Project, based at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences of Harvard University. Working with faculty across schools of Harvard and at collaborating Chinese universities, he has developed and managed the interdisciplinary China Project from its inception.

See the main China Project website for a summary of this work, starting with research and editing of the book that launched the Project, Energizing China (1998, HUCE and Harvard U. Press, with Michael McElroy and Peter Lydon). More recently he co-led a Harvard-Tsinghua U. initiative to integrate economic, engineering, health, and policy components of the Project, reported in Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China (2007, MIT Press, with Mun S. Ho).

Nielsen contributes to the Project's atmospheric science research, including developing and managing the partnership with Tsinghua that built and operates an atmospheric station near Beijing. With Project scientists he has co-authored a number of articles on emissions, chemistry, and impacts of air pollutants and GHGs in China, and on wind power potentials. These include a cover article in Science and articles in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Atmospheric Environment, Environmental Science & Technology, and other journals.

Working with economists, atmospheric chemists, and environmental engineers at Harvard and Tsinghua, Nielsen co-leads (with Mun Ho) a new interdisciplinary initiative. It further integrates research capacities separately developed by the Project, linking the economy-to-health damage framework of Clearing the Air with the Project's atmospheric model of China and its improved national emission inventories. A forthcoming book succeeding Clearing the Air reports this research and assessment of economic costs and environmental benefits of two policies: a hypothetical national carbon tax and the SO2 controls actually implemented in 2006-2010. Nielsen and colleagues are now using the framework to evaluate a range of carbon tax options and a NOx control policy for 2013-2020.

Nielsen has a B.A. in Geology from Colorado College, where he was a Boettcher Scholar, and an S.M. in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earlier lived in Taipei, Taiwan, where he worked for the Colorado state trade and investment office.

Contacts:

Chris Nielsen
Executive Director
Harvard China Project, SEAS
Cruft Lab #212
19 Oxford St.
Cambridge, MA 02138

Email: nielsen2@fas.harvard.edu
Phone: 617-496-2378
Fax: 617-384-8016