Prof. Klaus Keller

Klaus serves as the Hodgson Distinguished Professor of Engineering. Before joining Dartmouth Engineering, Klaus Keller was a professor of geosciences at Penn State where he directed the Center for Climate Risk Management. Prior to that, he worked as a research scientist and lecturer at Princeton University and as an engineer in Germany. Professor Keller graduated from Princeton with a PhD in civil and environmental engineering. He received master’s degrees from MIT and Princeton, as well as a Diplom-Ingenieur degree from the Technische Universität Berlin. His research addresses two interrelated questions. First, how can we mechanistically understand past and potentially predict future changes in the Earth system? Second, how can we use this information to design sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible risk management strategies? He analyzes these questions by mission-oriented basic research covering a wide range of disciplines such as engineering, Earth sciences, economics, philosophy, decision science, and statistics. He contributed to reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-edited an open source textbook, and published more than 150 peer-reviewed studies. His research, mentoring, and service have been recognized by several prizes, for example the 2019 Penn State Outstanding Postdoc Mentor Award.