Biography of Thomas Homer-Dixon

He was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1956 and grew up in a rural area outside the city. After studying for two years at the University of Victoria in the late-1970s, he moved to Ottawa, where in 1980 he received his B.A. in Political Science from Carleton University. He then founded a national student organization that encouraged debate on the ethical implications of scientific research, and he traveled widely overseas.

In 1983, he began graduate work in Political Science at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied international relations, defense and arms control policy, and conflict theory. He also read widely in social psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind and language, and environmental science. After completing his Ph.D. in 1989, he moved to the University of Toronto and, in the subsequent eight years, led several international research projects examining the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. In recent years, his research has focused on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

Besides The Ingenuity Gap, his books include Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton University Press, 1999) and, coedited with Jessica Blitt, Ecoviolence: Links among Environment, Population, and Security (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Dr. Homer-Dixon has been invited to speak about his research at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell Universities, UC Berkeley, MIT, West Point, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He twice briefed Al Gore during his tenure as Vice President of the United States.