Jerry MELILLO

Jerry Melillo

Jerry's Updated Autobiography (2021)

My life since leaving Staples has been a wonderful adventure. After graduating from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut with a BA and a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT), I taught biology at a Kenyan high school on the Kenya/Uganda border and at Weston High School. One of my great joys at Weston was helping to coach the football team.

After several years at Weston, I went on to Yale to study ecology and graduated in 1977 with my Ph.D. Since that time, I have been a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 1989, I became director of the MBL’s environmental research center, The Ecosystems Center. Several years ago I stepped down from the directorship to return to my research and to work at the interface between science and public policy, a long-standing interest of mine.

During the second Clinton Administration, I took a leave from my job at the Marine Biological Laboratory to serve for two years as the Science Advisor for the Environment in the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Climate change issues, including aspects of climate change policy, were a major focus of my work at OSTP.

After returning to Woods Hole from DC, I continued to interact with government agencies in a variety of ways. For example, I chaired the first three rounds of the National Climate Assessment for the Federal Government - published in 2000, 2009, and 2014. The reports analyzed the latest climate change science with a focus on climate change effects on us and on our environment.

Today, I spend a lot of my time continuing to work on climate change and its impacts on land ecosystems. I have done field research on this topic across the globe, from the Brazilian Amazon to the Swedish Arctic. With colleagues at MIT, I have also been involved in building computer models that allow us to explore potential environmental consequences of different levels of greenhouse gas emissions over the 21^st century– “what if” research on a global scale.

I have received a number of honors for my work including election to the National Academy of Sciences, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. My passion for science started at Staples with great teachers like Clarence Berger (Chemistry) and Nick Georgis (Physics).

On a more personal note, my wife, Lalise (O’Brien) and I have been married since 1969 and we have one son, Edward (Ted). I met Lalise in the mid-1960s when we were both students in Wesleyan’s MAT program. Lalise is a truly gifted teacher. She taught English, History and Rhetoric at Falmouth Academy, a small private school on Cape Cod. She retired after five decades in the classroom, although she still mentors Falmouth Academy students and teaches an adult Shakespeare course at the school each fall. Our summers are filled with visits from friends, many of whom are former students. We also fit our international travel adventures into the summer months – Europe (all over, with Paris, Venice and the Greek island of Alonissos being some of the favorites), Africa, (especially Kenya and Tanzania) Latin America (a river trip into the rainforest of Suriname on our honeymoon), and China.

Our son Ted inherited a passion for teaching from his mom and an interest in the environment from me. He has a Ph.D. in History from Yale and is now a Full Professor at Amherst College, where he teaches Environmental History. In 2020, Ted published a new book - The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World. Check it out.