Chris Nielsen is the executive director of the Harvard China Project, of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working with faculty from across schools of Harvard and at collaborating Chinese universities, he has led the development of and managed the interdisciplinary China Project from its inception under the Harvard University Center for Environment. He has a B.A. in Geology from the Colorado College, where he was a Boettcher Scholar, and an S.M. in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

See the main Harvard China Project website for a summary of this work. It includes co-leadership of a major Harvard-Tsinghua University study integrating several research areas 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).

He also contributes to the atmospheric science of the Project, including management of the partnership with Tsinghua that in 2004 built and continues to operate and analyze observations of a permanent, high-precision, atmospheric measurement station north of Beijing. He has contributed to a series of recent scientific articles, both on atmospheric trace gas pollutants and new estimates of the total potential for wind power in China.

Working with economists, atmospheric chemists, environmental engineers, and health scientists at Harvard and Tsinghua, Nielsen is co-managing a new major initiative. This aims to further link major research capacities of the China Project, now bringing the national economy-engineering-health framework of Clearing the Air together with the Project's atmospheric chemistry and transport model of China and detailed emission inventories developed originally at Tsinghua. This comprehensive research framework is designed for evaluation of the full health and economic benefits and costs of nearly any national strategy to limit Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases and local pollutants. It is currently being applied to two policies: an economy-wide carbon tax and the ongoing sulfur control measures of the 11th Five Year Plan. The team is also preparing to incorporate an updated version of its regional power sector model, and eventually its more recent wind power research capabilities.

Contacts:

Chris Nielsen
Executive Director
China Project, HSEAS and HUCE
Cruft Lab #212
19 Oxford St.
Cambridge, MA 02138

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