2010 Young Investigator Award
Kevin Gurney is an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science and associate director of the Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University. His work focuses on the global carbon cycle, understanding sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide, how carbon dioxide changes connect to climate change, and how to connect good climate science to development of sound public policy. He was the lead author on a 2002 publication in Nature addressing carbon dioxide inversions that is listed in the top 1 percent of Nature papers. He received a grant from NASA to build a carbon dioxide emissions inventory for the U.S. and led a project to create a high-resolution, interactive map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. The maps and system, called Vulcan, show carbon dioxide emissions at more than 100 times more detail than was available before. The model examines carbon dioxide emissions at local levels on an hourly basis. He has worked extensively with NGOs and with UN negotiators. Gurney received B.A. and M.P.P. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in ecology from Colorado State University. A member of Sigma Xi, he also belongs to the American Geophysical Union, Phi Kappa Phi and the Ecological Society of America. He is the co-author of Mending the Ozone Hole: Science, Technology and Policy (MIT Press).