William Collins is an internationally recognized expert in climate modeling and climate change science. His personal research concerns the interactions among greenhouse gases and aerosols, the coupled climate system, and global environmental change.
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Dr. Collins serves as the Director for the Climate and Ecological Sciences Division. At the University of California, Berkeley, he teaches in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and directs the new Environmental Resilience.
Dr. Collins’s role as Chief Scientist in launching the Department of Energy’s Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME) program was awarded the U.S. Department of Energy Secretary’s Achievement Award on May 7, 2015. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Geophysical Union’s Tyndall History of Global Environmental Change Lecturer in 2019. He was a Lead Author on the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for which the IPCC was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and has and will serve as Lead Author and Coordinating Lead Author on the Fifth and upcoming Sixth Assessments.
Before joining Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, Dr. Collins was a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and served as Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for the DOE/NSF Community Climate System Model project.
Dr. Collins received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and earned an M.S. and Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Chicago.
