Michael Mann is the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. Throughout his academic career, Mann has authored more than 180 publications and five books including The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, a detailed account of the solid science behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, of which Mann was the lead author, that incurred the wrath of climate change deniers and sparked an ongoing controversy. 

Mann has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA's outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He made Bloomberg News' list of fifty most influential people in 2013. He received the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication from Climate One in 2017, the Award for Public Engagement with Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union in 2018. In 2019 he received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and in 2020 he received the World Sustainability Award of the MDPI Sustainability Foundation. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Mann received his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Applied Math from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. degree in Physics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics from Yale University.