Mort David Webster Joins ESD Faculty as Assistant Professor

July 1, 2008

Mort David Webster, Visiting Professor in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, today joins the faculty of MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD) as an Assistant Professor

Professor Webster—whose research and teaching focuses on climate change and public policy—becomes the first junior member of the faculty with an ESD-only appointment.

"Mort Webster is one of the most astute scholars working on climate change policy analysis. He brings to his work sophisticated tools for managing the uncertainty associated with the prediction of climate change and the policies designed to mitigate them. We are fortunate to be able to welcome him to the ESD faculty, and look forward to working from him in this critical area of inquiry," said Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Engineering Systems and Director of ESD.

Professor Webster earned his Ph.D. from ESD in 2000 with a dissertation about decision-making and climate policy, and was an assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2001–2006. At UNC, he taught several classes on public policy analysis, including one on policy analysis for global climate change.

Professor Webster's affiliation with MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change extends back several years; he was a Research Associate at the Program from 2000–2001.

Professor Webster is interested in exploring the interface between formal quantitative models and the policy process. His research focuses on how to analyze the uncertainty in assessment models of global climate change to produce insights that are useful to the policy community—including addressing the role of learning in the future on today's decisions, the effect of uncertainty on multi-stakeholder negotiations, and better means of communicating results to non-experts.

Professor Webster holds an M.S. from MIT's Technology and Policy Program (1996) and a B.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering (1988) from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an Associate Editor of Energy Economics.

His most recent article, "Incorporating Path Dependency into Decision Analytic Methods: An Application to Global Climate Change Policy," appears in the June 2008 issue of Decision Analysis.