Paul Kirshen

Dr. Kirshen is a Carsey Senior Faculty Fellow and has thirty years of experience serving as principal investigator/ project manager of complex, interdisciplinary, participatory research related to water resources and coastal zone management and climate variability and change. He is presently the Academic Director, Sustainable Solutions Lab, Professor of Climate Adaptation, School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Previous to that, he was a research professor at the Environmental Research Group of Department of Civil Engineering and the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and served as Climate Change Adaptation Research Leader at Battelle Memorial Institute. From 1996 to 2009, he was a research professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at Tufts University and director and co-founder of the Water: Systems, Science, and Society (WSSS) Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program. He is also a lead author for the 2014 Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment and the 2013 US National Climate Assessment, is a member of  ICLEI  USA– Local Governments for Sustainability’s  Climate Adaptation Steering Committee, and a member of the Massachusetts Climate Change Adaptation Advisory Committee and its Coastal Zone and Ocean Subcommittee.

He was project manager/principal investigator of a $900,000 U.S. EPA grant to investigate the integrated impacts of climate change on metro Boston and to develop recommendations for adaptation actions (CLIMB Project, 1999-2004). This included the infrastructure systems of transportation, water supply, wastewater management, energy demand, coastal and river flooding, public health, and building integrity. Recently, he was leader of a team investigating climate change coastal flooding impacts in the Northeastern United States for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Ongoing relevant projects include developing guidance tools for planning and management of urban drainage systems under a changing climate for U.S. NOAA with Somerville, Massachusetts, as one of the case studies and also for U.S. NOAA investigating the impacts of increased coastal flooding in East Boston, Massachusetts, and eastern shore of Maryland with particular emphasis on vulnerable populations and adaptation options. He is also part of teams conducting a national vulnerability assessment of US Army Corps of Engineers projects and programs, investigating municipal adaptation options to SLR in several New England municipalities using the COAST tool, and developing a drainage and sewer masterplan for Boston Water and Sewer Commission. He has also conducted water and climate management research in West Africa since 1974.

He has over fifty published journal articles on these topics as well as many book chapters and reports. He received his ScB in engineering from Brown University and his MS and PhD in civil engineering from MIT.