backaid.pages.dev

John perlin biography

    •

Let it Shine

From Space to Earth

A Forest Journey

Godfather of Sol

Curriculum Vitae

Home

Godfather of Sol

John Perlin has seen the light —

but is there time for the rest of us?

by Nick Welsh
Santa Barbara News & Review
April 21, 2005

John Perlin is a lot of things. A solar energy expert. A voracious researcher. And a doting father. But more than anything else, John Perlin is a natural-born storyteller; a storyteller of staggering scope and ambition. Perlin's first book - exploring the use of solar energy in antiquity - covered a span of 2,500 years. His second book, A Forest Journey - which Harvard University placed on its list of 100 essential books - synthesized 5,000 years of human history, demonstrating that civilizations rose and fell based on their ability, or failure, to secure timber. By contrast, Perlin's most recent tome - which traces the evolution of photovoltaic solar energy - is a relatively modest undertaking, encompassing a scant 50 years of scientific and technical progress. Up close and personal, Perlin appears to be having way t

    •

FOH Members

Jonathan B. Perlin is President, Clinical Operations and Chief Medical Officer, HCA Healthcare, where he leads clinicians, data scientists, and researchers in using a learning health system model for improving care at the system’s 185 hospitals and 2,200 sites of care. His team’s work has achieved national recognition for preventing elective preterm deliveries, reducing maternal mortality, increasing sepsis survival, and developing public-private-academic partnerships for improving infection prevention and treating COVID-19. Their implementation of the ”Surviving Sepsis Campaign” and a computerized algorithm has saved over 8,000 lives and was recognized as the 2019 Red Hat Innovation of the Year and also earned the John M. Eisenberg Award for National Innovation in Patient Safety. In 2021, Perlin launched the “Consortium of HCA Healthcare and Academia for Research Generation” in partnership with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and multiple universities (Columbia, Cleveland Clinic, Duke, Harvard, Meharry, UMass, UCSF) to accelerate the understanding of

    •

John Perlin has written four highly acclaimed books on solar energy and forestry, among them A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization (Countryman, 2005), From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity (Routledge, 1999), and Let It Shine: The 6000 Year Story of Solar Energy (New World Library 2013, with a Foreword by Amory Lovins).

Harvard University Press has chosen A Forest Journey as a Harvard Classic in Science and World History and as one of the one hundred books ever published by the press that should be on every bookshelf, alongside renowned sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. After reading A Forest Journey, Nobel Laureate Dr. Walter Kohn invited Mr. Perlin to join the department of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara to collaborate with him and another Nobel Laureate, Dr. Alan Heeger, on the movie The Power of the Sun, which tells the story of the evolution of the science of light and its role in the development of photovoltaics. The screening of The Power of the Sun at Campbell initiated the

Copyright ©backaid.pages.dev 2025