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Professor of the at ����AV has been appointed as Senior Fellow for Climate and Energy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He joins CFR to expand research and outreach in their Energy Security and Climate Change Program. He will also help Senior Fellow Varun Sivaram launch a new crosscutting initiative on climate change. 

“I am excited to partner again with my colleague and coauthor,” said Hart. In 2020, he and Sivaram (along with Colin Cunliff, Julio Friedmann, and David Sandalow) published a strategic framework for clean energy innovation, . In this monograph, they outline how a significant federal research and development investment would propel clean energy technology to market faster, simultaneously strengthening the U.S. economy and combating climate change. Many of their recommendations were incorporated into federal appropriations and other legislation during the Biden administration. 

Hart’s outreach with the council will build on his large body of work examining clean energy and climate-tech innovation policy. His research areas will include the interplay between trade policy and climate change; and bringing emerging technologies to commercial scale and expanding their adoption globally. 

He also devotes attention to educating the next generation of policy experts. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Hart led a designed to introduce early-career scientists to the policy process so that they might position their research more effectively to influence policymakers. He also mentors several doctoral students in the Schar School’s , providing them with experience conducting funded research. Doctoral student Chad Smith collaborated with Hart in developing the , an assessment of how much national governments contribute to clean energy innovation, noting that the United States’ contribution has declined since 2016. A recent article, co-authored with doctoral student Hyeseon Na, introduces the concept of “future avoided emissions,” or how higher-income countries might export advanced machinery to help reduce carbon consumption in lower-income countries.  

Hart is a veteran in this policy space, having served both as assistant director for innovation policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2011 to 2012 and as director of the Center for Clean Energy Innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation from 2016 to 2022. In 2023, Hart was named a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.