Robert Socolow is an emeritus professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he has spent a half-century teaching, studying and expanding how scientists and society understand the environment. He helped establish Princeton's High Meadows Environmental Institute, and he founded and directed the Carbon Mitigation Initiative with Stephen Pacala. Socolow and Pacala are co-authors of the Stabilization Wedges, a widely published and cited intellectual framework for cutting carbon emissions with available tools.