Vice President, Programs, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (ex officio)
Jesse H. Ausubel is Vice President for Programs of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (ex officio) and Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Mr. Ausubel spent the first decade of his career in Washington, DC working for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and National Academy of Engineering. On behalf of the Academies, he was one of the main organizers of the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979, an event which substantially elevated the global warming issue on scientific and political agendas. He also coordinated and authored much of the 1983 NAS report Changing Climate, the first comprehensive review of the greenhouse effect. In addition, that year he drafted Toward an International Geosphere-Biosphere Program: A Study of Global Change, the report originating the Global Change Research Program.
Since 1989 Mr. Ausubel has served on the faculty of The Rockefeller University, where he leads a research program to elaborate the technical vision of a large, prosperous society that emits little or nothing harmful and spares large amounts of land and sea for nature. Since 1994 he has concurrently served as a program manager in basic research for the Sloan Foundation. In the late 1990s Mr. Ausubel helped initiate the Census of Marine Life, an international observational program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans.
Beginning in 2002 he helped found the Barcode of Life Initiative, which aims to provide short DNA sequences that identify all animal and plant species. During 2006-2007 he served as the founding chair of the Encyclopedia of Life project to create a webpage for every species. Mr. Ausubel is the author or editor of more than 150 papers, reports, and books. In 2009 Dalhousie University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to environmental sciences, and in 2010 he received the Blue Frontier/Peter Benchley prize for ocean science.
