Tom Hilde is Research Professor in the School of Public Policy. He teaches courses in International Environmental Agreements, Moral Dimensions of Public Policy, Environment & Development, and Environmental Ethics. Trained in philosophy (PhD, Penn State 2001), Hilde comes to the School from New York University, where he directed the Environmental Conservation Education Program and the Applied Philosophy Group, and taught interdisciplinary seminars in environmental politics, science and philosophy, and development ethics. He has also taught courses at Penn State and Texas A&M on philosophy of technology and artificial intelligence. Hilde was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Venezuela in 2005 and is a member of the UNESCO Global Ethics Observatory.

Hilde co-edited The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism (2000); translated Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (2004); and recently edited On Torture (2008), a subject on which he has also given congressional testimony. He has published several articles in political thought, ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics. His volume Pragmatism and Globalism will appear in 2009. Current book projects include one on sustainable development as democratic self-organization, and another on the question of democratic legitimacy in international environmental and development policy institutions. Current research includes a focus on post-Kyoto Protocol climate change adaptation and on public ethics regarding climate change.

Hilde has lived in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Nepal, and France. He makes his home today in Washington, DC.