Dean Edwin Abrahamson is professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, co-chair of the university's Council on Environmental Quality, an adjunct professor at the University of Iceland, and a member of the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He has degrees in physics, medicine, and biology and has held a variety of jobs in industry, government, and academia. Since the late 1960s his primary work has been environmental and public health implications of energy policies, and for the last several years it has focused on the policy implications of the greenhouse effect.