Richard “Dick” Meserve served as the ninth Carnegie president from April 2003 through August 2014.
He is senior of counsel with the law firm of Covington & Burling, where he was a partner. He focuses on issues at the intersection of law, regulation, science, and public policy. From 1999 to 2003, Meserve was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Early in his career, he served as legal counsel to President Carter’s science and technology adviser and was a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Meserve is chairman of the International Nuclear Safety Group, chartered by the International Atomic Energy Agency. He is a former chair of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and has served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future; the National Commission on Energy Policy; the National Academies Science, Technology, and Law Committee (co-chair); the National Academies Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy; and the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering Visiting Committee. He serves on numerous legal and scientific committees, including many chartered by the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.
Meserve is a trustee of CDRF Global, the Foundation for Nuclear Studies, and the Universities Research Association, Inc., and he serves on the Council and Trust of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves on the Council of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He joined the Harvard University Board of Overseers in 2007 and served as that group’s president from 2012 to 2013. He chairs the Harvard board’s standing committee on natural and applied sciences and serves on the executive committee and the committee on institutional policy. In addition, he serves on the governing boards’ joint committee on inspection, Harvard’s audit committee, and Chair of the Overseers’ visiting committee to the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a member of the visiting committee to the Kennedy School of Government. Meserve serves on the board of directors of various energy companies. He serves as chair of the nuclear committee of Energy Future Holdings Corporation and is a member of an independent advisory board to UniStar Nuclear Energy, LLC, and Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, LLC. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Meserve earned a B.A. from Tufts University; a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review; and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University. He has been honored with numerous awards over the years.
