Dr. William Collins is an internationally recognized expert in climate modeling and climate change science. He serves as the Director for the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD) in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab). In addition Dr. Collins is a senior scientist at LBNL, a Professor in Residence in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California(UC), Berkeley, and the Director of the Climate Readiness Institute (CRI), a multi-campus initiative to prepare the Bay Area for climate change. Before joining UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, Dr. Collins was a Senior Scientist and Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for the DOE/NSF Community Climate System Model project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He was a Lead Author on the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for which the IPCC was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and is also a Lead Author on the Fifth IPCC Assessment.  Dr. Collins is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and American Physical Society (APS) and was awarded the DOE Secretarial Honor Award for launching DOE’s Accelerated Climate Model for Energy in 2015.