Bruce Beck

Trained as an Engineer — first Chemical (BSc, University of Exeter, 1970), then Control (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1973) — Bruce Beck came to IIASA as a Research Scholar and Task Leader in the Resources and Environment Area in 1977, having been the recipient during 1973-77 of two Research Fellowships from the Royal Society (Lund, Sweden, and Cambridge, UK). What sparked his curiosity then, as now, were questions such as these: how to put the Environment on a computer; what to do with that computer model when empirical experience of the real thing proves it inadequate; and how to explore options for our futures in the face of these inevitably flawed models. IIASA was a place to be disabused of mono-disciplinary and national prides in some senses; the best of senses, in fact — in becoming humble in the face of great and fruitful variety. Beck's 2002 monograph Environmental Foresight and Models: A Manifesto sums up almost a decade of networked research pivoting on the Dynamic Systems (DYN) Program at the Institute.

After leaving IIASA in 1982, eleven years in the Department of Civil Engineering at Imperial College, London, and the approach of the Millennium opened out the possibility for Professor Beck of conceiving of "Sustainable Cities" and of the paths of technological innovation towards such sunlit uplands. Since 1993, as Wheatley-Georgia Research Alliance Professor and Eminent Scholar in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia in the USA (www.modeling.uga.edu), those cities have come to be imagined as "forces for good" in the environment: ideas currently being articulated in association with fellow Scholars Thompson and Crutzen (www.engineeringchallenges.org). Cities & Flows they call it, or CAF, threading through the cross-cutting Institute studies of Water and into Fragility of Critical Infrastructures (FCI).

In the past decade, stimulation for Bruce Beck has come from "Engineer Meets Social Scientists". CAF is suffused with Michael Thompson's Cultural Theory and Clumsy Institutions, as well as considerations of the business cases for the fastest possible escape from the comprehensive technological lock-in of metropolitan water infrastructures. The TransAtlantic Uncertainty Colloquium (TAUC), a US NSF and EPA project currently led by Professor Beck, is examining the legal and political economy of handling uncertainty in models employed at the Science-Policy interface — a mature topic of IIASA's research over the years. The ambition is to see the Institute as a key actor in "WAUCing the TAUC".