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David Denkenberger

Director & Co-founder, Assistant Prof. Mechanical Engineering

Dr. David Denkenberger received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his M.S.E. from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patented expanded microchannel heat exchanger.

He is an assistant professor at University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand in mechanical engineering. 

He donates half his income to ALLFED.

He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is a Penn State distinguished alumnus, and is a registered professional engineer.

He has authored or co-authored over 120 publications (>3400 citations, >50,000 downloads, h-index = 33, second most prolific author in the existential/global catastrophic risk field), including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. His food work has been featured in over 25 countries, over 200 articles, including Science, Vox, Business Insider, Deutchlandfunk (German Public Radio online), Discovery Channel Online News, Gizmodo, Phys.org, and Science Daily.

He has given interviews on 80,000 Hours podcast and Estonian Public Radio, WGBH Radio, Boston, and WCAI Radio on Cape Cod, USA. He has given over 90 technical presentations, including ones on food at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cornell University, University of California Los Angeles, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, Imperial College, and University College London.

Prior to Canterbury, he taught mechanical engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for four years, taught architectural engineering at Tennessee State University in Nashville for three years, and consulted on energy efficiency for five years in Durango, Colorado.

 

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