Benjamin Lee Preston

Benjamin Preston (he/his) is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and director of Community Health and Environmental Policy, a program of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being. He is also a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School. He recently returned to RAND after serving as  the assistant director for Climate Services and Adaptation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the terms of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility Program.

Preston’s recent research efforts include understanding the role of knowledge in climate risk management, analysis of disaster recovery options and their implementation in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, scenario analysis for a low-carbon future, and the implications of COVID-19 for the delivery of infrastructure services. Previously, he held research positions with the Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the CSIRO’s Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

In 2015, he received the American Geophysical Union’s Falkenberg Award, and from 2016 to 2017 he was one of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s inaugural Leshner Leadership Fellows. Preston has contributed to national and international scientific assessments including the U.S. National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program’s Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic. He currently serves as co-editor-in-chief for the Elsevier journal Climate Risk Management.

Preston received a B.S. in biology from the College of William & Mary and a Ph.D. in environmental biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.