Arjun Makhijani

Arjun Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, specializing in nuclear fusion.

Dr. Makhijani is the author and co-author of numerous reports and books on energy and environment related issues. He has done extensive work on nuclear and renewable energy as well as on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons production and testing. He is also author or co-author of reports and analyses of radionuclides emissions from nuclear weapons facilities, radiological conditions at nuclear production and testing sites, worker exposures, and the risks of radiation exposure. His recent work on renewable energy, Prosperous, Renewable Maryland, includes hour-by-hour modeling of the Maryland electricity sector and energy justice in a transition to renewable energy. He is principal editor and co-author of Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects, (MIT Press, 1995 and 2000). He published articles in journals and magazines as varied as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Environment, The Physics of Fluids, and The Washington Post.

Since 2004, he has served on a team to provide scientific support to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. He has served as a consultant on energy issues to utilities, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Edison Electric Institute, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and several agencies of the United Nations.

In 2007, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, an honor granted each year to at most half-a-percent of the Society’s members. He was named a Ploughshares Hero, by the Ploughshares Fund; was awarded the Jane Bagley Lehman Award of the Tides Foundation in 2008 and the Josephine Butler Nuclear Free Future Award in 2001; and in 1989 he received The John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism of the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, with Robert Alvarez.

Dr. Makhijani has testified before Congress, and has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, CBS 60 Minutes, NPR, CNN, and BBC, among others. He has served as a consultant on energy issues to utilities, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Edison Electric Institute, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and several agencies of the United Nations.