Daniel M. Kammen served as the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, holding parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the Department of Nuclear Engineering. He was the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, and director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. Kammen earned his A.B. in Physics from Cornell University in 1984, followed by an M.A. in 1986 and a Ph.D. in 1988 from Harvard University in Physics. He conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard before joining Princeton University as an assistant professor and chair of the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 1993 to 1998. In 1999, he moved to UC Berkeley, where he directed research on energy supply, transmission, smart grids, low-carbon energy systems, life-cycle impacts of transportation, and energy for community development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Kammen has authored or co-authored twelve books and more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, including the highly cited paper 'Ethanol can contribute to energy and environmental goals' published in Science in 2006 and 'Putting Renewables to Work: How Many Jobs Can the Clean Energy Industry Generate?' in 2008. He served as the World Bank's Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency from 2010 to 2011 and as the first Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas Fellow appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999, he contributed to the IPCC's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Kammen is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has served on National Academy of Sciences boards, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Technical Advisory Board, and the Global Environment Facility's Technical Review Board. He co-developed the Property Assessed Clean Energy financing model, recognized by Scientific American as the top World Changing Idea of 2009. In October 2025, he retired from UC Berkeley as Professor Emeritus.

Professional Email: kammen@berkeley.edu