Frans Berkhout

2007 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Frans Berkhout is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Environment, Society and Climate at King’s College London. He joined the Department of Geography at King’s in 2013.

 

From 2013-2015, he was Director of the Future Earth programme, based at the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris. Before that, Prof Berkhout directed the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the VU University Amsterdam in The Netherlands and led the Amsterdam Global Change Institute.

 

He has also held posts at SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, and was Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Global Environmental Change and Sustainable Technologies programmes.

 

Professor Berkhout holds a Geography BSc (Leeds, 1983) and a PhD in Science and Technology Policy Studies (Sussex, 1989). He did post-doctoral research at Princeton University.

 

Among other advisory roles, Professor Berkhout was a lead author in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (2014) and a member of the Social Science Panel of the Research Evaluation Framework (REF2014) of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He sits on the editorial boards of Research Policy, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions and The Anthropocene Review.

 

Professor Berkhout’s early research was concerned with the economic, political and security aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. His more recent work has been concerned with science, technology, policy and sustainability, with a focus on climate change.

 

Professor Frans Berkhout contributed to the reports of the IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.