Sheldon J. Reaven is a professor at SUNY/Stony Brook, in the Department of Technology and Society, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (where he directs a graduate program in Environmental and Waste Management), and in the Marine Sciences Research Center. He is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A.) and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D.) He works on environmental disputes, such as those over nuclear waste and power risks, recycling and pollution prevention, global warming, and cool futuristic technologies, and philosophy and history of science and technology, especially the diagnosis of methodological, conceptual, and ethical issues underlying scientific controversies. For the past five years, he has been working especially on nuclear, chemical, and biological threats and teaching his Honors College course, “Weapons of Mass Destruction and the War on Terrorism.”

Professor Reaven is an inveterate military history buff, a passionate crusader for classical music, and an ardent admirer of golden retrievers, the Cadillac of Dogs. Frightened in his tender years by giant ants in Them and the giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, he has been an aficionado of science fiction ever since.

Inasmuch as he has the requisite strange and wide-ranging interests, he was the Faculty Advisor to I-CON and to the Science Fiction Forum for twelve years.