David Keith, PhD

David Keith is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also founder of Carbon Engineering, a company developing technology to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air for carbon removal or to make carbon-neutral, carbon-based fuels.

Keith’s work lies at the juncture of climate science, energy technology and public policy. He is best known for his research on solar geoengineering — the idea of manipulating the earth’s climate directly to counteract the effects of global warming — and its associated financial, environmental and moral costs.

Keith can be described as a man of firsts. His long list over the past 25-plus years includes performing a quantitative analysis of the regional inequalities of solar geoengineering, leading a quantitative study on the climatic impacts of large-scale wind power and building an interferometer for atoms and a high-accuracy infrared spectrometer.

Beyond his more than 170 peer-reviewed articles, Keith’s 2013 book, A Case for Climate Engineering, was the first such work on geoengineering written by a researcher for a non-specialist audience.