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Gregory Evans van der Vink (born December 14, 1956) is an American geophysicist who has made contributions to the theory of plate tectonics, aspects of Nuclear arms reduction, Natural Hazards, and as a leading advocate for the use of science in the development of public policy and international affairs.

After receiving his B.A. in Geology at Colgate University in 1979, van der Vink attended Princeton University, completing his M.S. in 1981 and Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of W. Jason Morgan. Van der Vink then spent two years as a United States National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, before going to the United States Congress as a Congressional Science Fellow.

Scientific Contributions
Van der Vink’s dissertation examined how continents rifted to form new ocean basins, developing a model for the formation of the Norwegian-Greenland Sea based on propagating rifts. Building upon the work of his academic advisor W. Jason Morgan, he explained the formation of Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the Vøring Plateau as a consequence of interaction between a migrating mid-ocean ridge and a mantle plume. His work on continental rifting lead to the discovery that new rifting preferentially occurs in weaker continental crust, creating the continental fragments that are seen as displaced terranes. He continued his work on the evolution of Iceland and plate-boundaries within the Arctic Ocean at the Naval Research Laboratory with a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, awarded by the National Academy of Sciences. His work on continental rifting and mantle plumes was published in Scientific American, and he received the Department of Navy Commendation and Special Achievement Award for Exceptional Performance in 1984.

Public Policy
As a postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, van der Vink was introduced to the role of geophysics in detecting clandestine nuclear weapons testing; and was inspired by physicists Wolfgang Panofsky and Richard Garwin to work on public policy issues as a scientist. In 1985 he won a Congressional Science Fellowship from the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, where he then directed a study on Seismic Verification of Nuclear Testing Treaties. , testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

As a means of implementing the policy recommendations of his Congressional work, van der Vink was asked by one of his previous academic advisors, Robert A. Phinney, to become the Director of Planning for the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) in 1989. At IRIS, he was the lead author of the influential report “The Role of Seismology in Deterring the Development of Nuclear Weapons”, which advocated for the inclusion of open-source data in intelligence estimates on the Soviet Union’s compliance with arms control agreements. He was recognized for “his overall skill in generating a geopolitical and scientific document that the Congress put great faith in.” Following van der Vink’s recommendation, the US Congress increased funding for the IRIS-USGS Global Seismographic Network to support its use as open-source data for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Then-President of the United States Bill Clinton appointed van der Vink to the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board of the US Department of State on March 25,1995. Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on September 24,1996.

For his work on promoting the use of science in policy development, van der Vink was awarded an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations in 1992. He was subsequently elected to Council membership with the recommendation of President Clinton’s Science Advisor John H. Gibbons. Van der Vink called upon scientists to be more actively involved in policy-making, and to take responsibility for how their work is used within the political arena.

Teaching
Based on his experiences as a scientist working with policy-makers, van der Vink developed for Princeton University a series of innovative science courses that he taught from 1991 to 2016. The courses provided the basic tenets of science underlying major policy debates ranging from arms-control verification and nuclear-waste disposal to natural-hazard mitigation and climate change. In 2000, Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman, appointed van der Vink the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2004 he received the Excellence in Teaching Award from Princeton University’s Engineering Council. Within the scientific community, he advocated for the development of multi-disciplinary science courses that evaluated scientific solutions in concert with economic, social, and political considerations. The goal being to produce the next generation of scientists who are effective in contributing scientific analysis and thinking to the policy-making process.

International Development
While teaching an advanced course in the Princeton Geoscience Department titled: “Climate Change, Poverty and Conflict”, van der Vink became frustrated at the inability to predict human responses to climate change using climate models. By chance, he came upon the observation of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, that there had never been a famine in a democracy. With his students, van der Vink built upon Sen’s observation and extended it to natural disasters, demonstrating that one of the strongest predictors of a humanitarian disaster is the democracy index of the nation in which a natural disaster occurs. Adapting algorithms from his previous work in seismology, van der Vink developed a methodology to combine human-social-cultural-behavioral (HSCB) data to measure a population’s resilience and capacity. When measures of resilience and capacity were integrated with the climate models, the estimates of societal vulnerability improved greatly.