Allison M. Macfarlane

July 9, 2024

Allison M. Macfarlane is currently Professor and Director, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Faculty of Arts, the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dr. Macfarlane has held both academic and government positions in the field of energy and environmental policy, especially nuclear policy. She was the first geologist (and the third woman) to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; her tenure was from 2012 to 2014. From 2010 to 2012, Dr. Macfarlane served on the White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, created by the Obama Administration to recommend a new national policy on high-level nuclear waste. She has been on the faculty at Georgia Tech in Earth Science and International Affairs, at George Mason University in Environmental Science and Policy, and in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. She was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Applied Public Policy at Flinders University and Carnegie Mellon Adelaide in Australia.

Dr Macfarlane has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC; Radcliffe College; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Stanford University; and Harvard University. She has served on National Academies committees on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons issues, and she has chaired the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that sets the Bulletin’s famous “doomsday clock.” In 2006, MIT Press published a book she co-edited, Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste. Dr. Macfarlane has published extensively, including in Science, Nature, Environmental Science and Technology, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and other journals. Dr. Macfarlane’s research has focused on technical, social, and policy aspects of nuclear energy production and nuclear waste management and disposal as well as regulation, nuclear nonproliferation, and energy policy. Dr. Macfarlane holds a BS from the University of Rochester and a PhD in earth science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

---