University
Professor; The Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor
of Economics
and Finance; Professor, Engineering
and Public Policy and Heinz College;
Director, Green
Design Initiative
Risk
analysis of management, including air pollution, carcinogenicity
of chemicals, safety of dams, and highway safety;
and product and process design for the environment,
including life-cycle analysis.
B.A. (Economics)
1960, Reed College
Ph.D. (Economics) 1963, Harvard University.
Carnegie
Mellon, 1963 -.
Professor
Lave's work is focused on environmental quality and
risk management. An early paper estimated the value
of better weather information; recent work derives
the optimal protocol to determine if a pregnant woman's
fetus has a neural tube defect. Research on the information
content of the National Cancer Institute lifetime
rodent bioassay demonstrated that the test has less
information than had been assumed.
Professor
Lave's papers on managing the risks of catastrophic
dam failure due to overtopping demonstrated how to
quantify the risks. The work concluded that current
safety goals are much higher for dams than for bridges
and buildings.
Other
recent work deals with developing public policy concerning
greenhouse effects, in view of large uncertainties
about the magnitude and timing of these effects.
In collaboration
with Baruch Fischhoff and Granger Morgan, Professor
Lave is engaged in research on risk perception and
communication.
Professor
Lave is the head of the university-wide Green Design
Initiative which is working with businesses, such
as IBM; and with government agencies such as the Department
of Energy to address the fundamental problems in pollution
prevention.
He is
a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National
Academy of Science and a recipient of the Distinguished
Achievement Award of the Society for Risk Analysis.
Representative
Publications
Lester
B. Lave, H. MacLean, R. Lankey, S. Joshi, F. McMichael,
A. Horvath, and C. Hendrickson, "Life Cycle Inventories
of Conventional and Alternative Automobile Fuel/Propulsion
Systems: Summary and Conclusions," Proceedings
of the 2000 Total Life Cycle Conference, SAE, 283-292,
2000. Environmental Science & Technology, Vol.
34, No. 17, pp. 3598-3605 2000
Lester
B. Lave and Joshi S. and Krishnan R. "Estimating
the Hidden Costs of Environmental Regulation"
The Accounting Review April 2001
“The
Ethanol Answer to Carbon Emissions”, Lester
B. Lave, W. Michel Griffin Heather MacLean, Issues
in Science and Technology, Winter 2002 |
