David Sittenfeld

Biography

David Sittenfeld, PhD, is the Director of the Center for the Environment at the Museum of Science, Boston. He has served as an educator at the Museum for more than 20 years, overseeing special projects and network-scale activities at the intersection of climate science and society.

Dr. Sittenfeld has led a diverse portfolio of large-scale Museum initiatives addressing a range of socio-scientific topics, including water and energy policy, nuclear waste siting, climate adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity, solar radiation management, synthetic biology, and planetary defense. He served as principal investigator for the NOAA-funded Citizen Science, Civics and Resilient Communities project and co-PI for the Science Center Public Forums project, which implemented community-based science-to-civics activities at 30 US science centers on extreme heat, drought, extreme precipitation, and sea level rise. He also led the Wicked Hot Boston and Wicked Hot Mystic projects, which identified heat- and air quality-related vulnerabilities in over 20 communities in and around Boston through community-engaged participatory science.

Dr. Sittenfeld holds a PhD in public policy with a concentration in sustainability and resilience from Northeastern University, where he researched and implemented participatory methods and geospatial modeling and visualization techniques for environmental health assessment and public engagement about climate-related hazards. He is cofounder of the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology network, is a member of the extended leadership committee of the National Informal STEM Education Network and is a member of the outreach planning committee for the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society, having received the ACS Salute to Excellence Awards in 2011 and 2019.