Matthew A. Shapiro

image from EAIWelcome to, the clearinghouse for all things related to my research and teaching. I am Associate Professor of Political Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in the Department of Social Sciences. I am also a research affiliate at Argonne National Laboratory’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research.

Why “understand green”? What is “green”?

The word is used extensively and prompts considerable debate. I pick apart its most widely accepted definition – long-term-orientation and sustainability – and examine how science and technology and their generation relate to human purpose and maximize public value.

To “understand green”, thus, I focus on information transfer problems in the context of environmental and science policies, looking particularly at the connections between publicly funded R&D and environmentally-related outcomes, how the public responds to the relevant science, and how the government incentivizes change in the public and private sectors. More specifically, I research the following:

  1. national innovation systems, particularly problems associated with non-collaborative R&D, the tendency for S&T clusters to develop, and limits to international technology transfer;
  2. the Northeast Asian region (i.e., Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan), where a mixture of technocracy, authoritarianism, and democracy has allowed Japan to lead epistemic community building efforts as well as mitigate the negative environmental effects of economic growth;
  3. the politicization of science, e.g., how people understand environmental and energy issues, particularly climate change, and how our elected officials convey such information;
  4. the technology of politics, such as how politicians use social media to signal the traditional media and how people interact in climate change discussions online;
  5. key environmental policies such as the carbon tax.

An updated publication list can be found here.

More information here: ResearchGategoogle