Jesse H. Ausubel
Vice President, ProgramsJesse H. Ausubel joined the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1994 and serves as Vice President of Programs. His main area of responsibility is support of basic research in science and technology. The programs for which he has responsibility include an observational program to census marine life; a laboratory program to develop a reference library of short DNA identifiers (barcodes) for plants, animals, and fungi; and an informatics program to develop a Web page for every species (The Encyclopedia of Life).
Mr. Ausubel’s earlier activities at Sloan have spanned development of new professional master's degrees in the sciences; studies of higher education as an industry and development of a simulation model of the U.S. university; use of the Internet to create a new habit by participants of contributing to the recent historical record in science and engineering; and explorations of what may be known, unknown, and unknowable in diverse fields of research.
Concurrently, Mr. Ausubel is Director of the Program for the Human Environment and Senior Research Associate at The Rockefeller University in New York City, where he has served on the faculty since 1989. The main themes of the Rockefeller research program are industrial ecology (the study of the network of all industrial processes as they may interact with each other and live off each other) and the long-term interactions of technology and the environment. Underlying the work are ongoing studies of the mathematics of growth and diffusion.
Throughout his career Mr. Ausubel has combined research with efforts to understand and strengthen the academic and research enterprise. During 1989-1993 Mr. Ausubel served as Director of Studies for the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government. The Commission, sponsored by Carnegie Corporation of New York, sought ways for American government at all levels, as well as international organizations, to make better use of scientific and technical expertise.
From 1977-1988, Mr. Ausubel was associated with the National Academy complex in Washington DC, where he began as a resident fellow of the National Academy of Sciences supported by the Sloan Foundation. He then served as a staff officer with the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and from 1983-1988 as Director of Programs for the National Academy of Engineering. Mr. Ausubel was one of the principal organizers of the first UN World Climate Conference (Geneva, 1979), an event which substantially elevated the global warming issue on scientific and political agendas. During 1979-1981 he led the Climate Task of the Resources and Environment Program of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, near Vienna, Austria, an East-West think-tank created by the U.S. and Soviet academies of sciences.
Mr. Ausubel has authored and edited more than 130 articles, reports, and books. He was the guest editor and lead author of the 1996 issue of Daedalus, "The Liberation of the Environment." He has published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, and American Scientist. Reports for which he was main author include "Changing Climate" (National Academy, 1983), the first comprehensive review of the greenhouse effect; and "Toward an International Geosphere-Biosphere Program" (IGBP), the 1983 Research Council report originating the Global Change Program. For the NAE, he developed and oversaw studies on the performance of technology-intensive sectors of U.S. industry and on the diffusion and globalization of technology. Educated at Harvard and Columbia universities, Mr. Ausubel serves on several editorial boards, including The Journal of Industrial Ecology, and the Committee on Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations.