Peter D. Blair, '73

I graduated from Swarthmore in 1973 with a B.S. in Engineering – I don’t think we formally distinguished between the fields in those days, but my concentration was mainly of the electrical variety. In the wake of the first Arab oil embargo, I opportunistically entered an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania in Energy Management and Power, although my research focus as a graduate student drifted towards operations research oriented tools for energy policy analysis. Research in new energy technologies and related issues was all the rage so a research fellowship was perhaps much easier to come by than it might have been otherwise, but it enabled me to plough through quickly to finish by the fall of 1976. 

Energy as a topic was still “hot” in the late 1970s so job prospects were abundant, but after considering opportunities from all over the country I was invited to stay on at Penn and join the faculty with a joint appointment between the School of Public and Urban Policy, which ultimately became affiliated with the Wharton School of Business, and the Energy Management and Power Program, run then primarily by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Swarthmore’s approach to engineering seemed to prepare me well, despite my pretty mediocre performance at Swat, to thrive in an interdisciplinary research and teaching environment working on policy problems ranging from energy-economic models, to commercialization of new energy technologies, and many related issues. I settled into what I imagined would be a fairly predictable research and teaching career -- teaching, carrying out sponsored research, consulting, and writing books and papers -- until I took what I thought would be a one-year leave in 1984 to work in Washington, DC.

I came to Washington as a visiting Senior Analyst to advise Congress on new electric power technologies at a unique Congressional agency called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Swarthmore’s demanding environment that, partly by design and partly by circumstance, connected engineering to the social sciences played a key role once again, as I found “doing” policy in Washington turns out to be quite different from thinking and writing about it in academia. Throughout the late 1980s and until 1996 my “one year leave” became a thirteen year career directing OTA’s Energy and Materials Research and subsequently serving as Assistant Director of the agency and Director of the Division of Industry, Commerce, and International Security, where I had the opportunity to testify frequently before many Congressional Committees in areas of energy and environmental policy and be very much involved in the activities supporting authorizing and appropriating federal research and development budgets, evolution of landmark federal legislation deregulating the electric power industry, and in many other areas. While I continued to take the Metroliner to Philadelphia every Thursday afternoon to teach graduate seminars on energy policy and energy modeling and simulation at Penn in an adjunct faculty capacity, I had really caught “Potomac fever” and had mentally and physically moved to Washington. It was a wild ride until OTA was closed in 1996, following the change in Congressional leadership in 1995.

From 1996-2001, I found myself in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as Executive Director of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, and publisher of the Society’s flagship publication, American Scientist. I served as Society’s chief executive officer responsible for the Society’s headquarters operations and well as its science and technology research and other programs, such as the Sigma Xi Research Center, the Grants-in-Aid of Research Program, College of Distinguished Lecturers, and the Media Resource Service. I also served Board of Directors of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and, ever missing academia at least a little, as an Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

In 2001 Washington beckoned once again, this time to assume the helm of the as Executive Director of the Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences (DEPS) of the National Research Council (NRC). The NRC is the operating arm of The National Academies, comprised of The National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, which convenes committees of academy members and other experts to provide science and technology policy advice to the federal government. DEPS is one of the NRC’s six operating divisions and includes many units covering the council’s work on energy, space, aeronautics, defense, materials, manufacturing, infrastructure, telecommunications, information technology, infrastructure, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and engineering design. I continue to survive well at the NRC, partly because I suppose this was a close to the OTA experience as is possible these days and, once again I am convinced, because the ability to think at the intersections of engineering and policy were sparked by Swarthmore’s approach to engineering education. My appreciation for that approach has grown immensely over the years so, for all you current students, you will find its enormous value as well.