Kurt Shickman is a Senior Fellow with the World Resources Institute supporting the institute’s program on heatresilience within the cities, buildings, and energy teams.  Prior to that he was a Buildings Heat Professional with KS Advisory after directing the Atlantic Council's Climate Resilience Center (ARSHT-Rock), which builds human capacityfor resilience in the face of climate impacts. Before joining ARSHT-Rock, he was the Executive Director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance (GCCA). GCCA is a non-profit dedicated to helping cities reduce urban heat to improve heatresilience, through the use of passive cooling solutions such as highly solar reflective surfaces. GCCA has led projectsfor the Clean Energy Ministerial, U.S. Department of Energy, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, and the World Bank. GCCA is the lead technical partner for the Million Cool Roofs Challenge – an initiative to rapidly establish markets for cool surfaces in countries facing an acute lack of access to cooling.

Prior to launching GCCA, Kurt was the Director of Research for the Energy Future Coalition and the United Nations Foundation’s Energy and Climate team. His work involved building broad and diverse coalitions of stakeholders aroundkey clean energy and climate change policies at the local, state, and federal level with a particular emphasis on dramatically scaling up the deployment of energy efficiency in existing residential and commercial buildings.

Kurt received his Masters degree with a focus on Energy Policy and Economics in 2007 from the Johns Hopkins Schoolof Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He has also worked in