TED Boca Raton: April 13, 2016
TED Coconut Creek: May 5, 2016
Fracking & Environment … Special Host: George Robbat
[youtube id=”lmbbtWFu0EU” align=”left” maxwidth=”350″] Robert “Rob” Jackson is a professor of biology and the Nicholas Chair of Global Environmental Change at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. His research involves the effect of humans on the earth, especially involving energy and land use and climate change. Jackson received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering at Rice University. He worked in the industry at the Dow Chemical Company for four years before receiving M.S. degrees in Ecology (1990) and Statistics (1992) and a Ph.D. in Ecology at Utah State University. He was a Department of Energy Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow for Global Change at Stanford University and an assistant professor at the University of Texas. In 1999, he became a part of Duke’s faculty. He is currently Director of Duke’s Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometry Laboratory and National Institute for Climate Change Research for the southeastern U.S., and has co-directed the Climate Change Policy Partnership. According to Thomas Reuters, Jackson is also among the top 0.5% of most cited scientific researchers.
[youtube id=”BBSVLGf7zPI” align=”right” maxwidth=”350″] Terry Engelder, a leading authority on the recent Marcellus gas shale play, holds degrees from Penn State B.S. (’68), Yale M.S. (’72) and Texas A&M, Ph.D. (’73). He is currently a Professor of Geosciences at PennState and has previously served on the staffs of the US Geological Survey, Texaco, and Columbia University. Short-term academic appointments include those of Visiting Professor at Graz University in Austria and Visiting Professor at the University of Perugia in Italy. Other academic distinctions include a Fulbright Senior Fellowship in Australia, Penn State’s Wilson Distinguished Teaching Award, membership in a US earth science delegation to visit the Soviet Union immediately following Nixon-Brezhnev dêtente, and the singular honor of helping Walter Alvarez collect the samples that led to the famous theory for dinosaur extinction by large meteorite impact. He has written 160 research papers, many focused on Appalachia, and a book, the research monograph “Stress Regimes in the Lithosphere.” His research focus for the past 35 years has been the interaction between earth stress and rock fracture. His work on gas shales first caught industry attention in the late 1970s and industry has engaged him ever since in learning how to recover gas from black shale. In the international arena, he has worked on exploration and production problems with companies including Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Agip, and Petrobras. In 2011 he was named to the Foreign Policy Magazine’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers for drawing international attention to the value of gas shale as an energy source.