Chauncey Starr

Chauncey Starr was an American electrical engineer and nuclear scientist, born April 14, 1912 in Newark, New Jersey and died April 17, 2007 in Atherton, California, who spent his career bridging nuclear engineering and the study of technological risk. After earning an electrical engineering degree and a doctorate in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute by 1935, he became a vice president at Rockwell International and led its Atomics International division before moving to academia as dean of the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1967. In 1973 he founded the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry funded research organization for the American electric power sector, and served as its first president. His 1969 paper in the journal Science, titled Social Benefit versus Technological Risk, proposed a framework for weighing the risks of a technology such as nuclear power against the benefits it delivers, work that helped found the modern field of risk analysis. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1965 and received the National Medal of Technology from President George H. W. Bush in 1990.