Justin Gillis

Former New York Times Climate Reporter, Justin Gillis is the Keynote Speaker for the Summit Session 5 on November 20, at 11:20am central time.

Justin Gillis is an author and consultant working on a book about how to solve global warming. He spent a decade as a reporter for The New York Times covering environmental science, with a special focus on climate change, and is now a contributing opinion writer for the newspaper. He was the author of a Times series called Temperature Rising that ran from 2010 to 2013 and updated readers on major developments in climate science, winning the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from Columbia University. He was also the principal author in 2014 of a series called The Big Fix that critically examined proposed solutions to climate change. In 2015, he was part of the Times team that covered the Paris climate conference, which produced the world’s most ambitious agreement to tackle global warming. He traveled to Antarctica twice in 2016 to create a series of articles and virtual-reality videos on the risk that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will collapse in a warming world.

He is a native of southern Georgia and a graduate of the University of Georgia, in journalism. Earlier in his career he worked at the Associated Press, The Miami Herald and The Washington Post. For the latter newspaper, he covered genetics, biotechnology and the completion of the Human Genome Project. In the 2004-2005 academic year, he was a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford.