D. Warner North

Dr. D. Warner North is president and principal scientist of NorthWorks, Inc., a consulting firm in San Francisco, California. Until 2009, he served as a consulting professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Over the past 45 years, Dr. North has carried out applications of decision analysis and risk analysis for electric utilities in the US and Mexico, for the petroleum and chemical industries, and for government agencies with responsibility for energy and environmental protection.

Dr. North has served as a member and consultant to the Science Advisory Board of the US Environmental Protection Agency since 1978, and as a presidentially-appointed member of the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (1989-1994). Dr. North is a co-author of many reports dealing with environmental risk for the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, including Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process (1983), Improving Risk Communication (1989), Science and Judgment in Risk Assessment (1994), Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society (1996), and Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making (2008).

Dr. North was a member of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management of the National Research Council from 1995 until 1999. He was Chair of the steering and advisory committees for the International Workshop on the Disposition of High-Level Radioactive Waste, held November 4-5, 1999, that led to the report, Disposition of High-Level Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel: The Continuing Societal and Technical Challenges, published in June 2001.

Dr. North is a past president (1991-92) of the international Society for Risk Analysis, a recipient of the Frank P. Ramsey Medal from the Decision Analysis Society in 1997 for lifetime contributions to the field of decision analysis, and the 1999 recipient of the Outstanding Risk Practitioner Award from the Society for Risk Analysis.

Dr. North received his PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University and his B.Sc. in Physics from Yale University.

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