Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values
Director, The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures
Affiliate Faculty Member, ASU Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

Joel Garreau, who joined the College in 2010, is a student of culture, values and change. Professor Garreau is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human, a look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. The genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnology revolutions are changing what it means to be human – modifying people’s minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities and progeny – not in some distant science fiction future but right now, on our watch. As director of The Prevail Project, he will build upon a Radical Evolution concept that the Prevail Scenario – the humanistic possibility that we can control and direct this future – might be encouraged. The idea is that if the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) can accelerate the technological future into being, perhaps the same can be done for the responses of our societies.

Professor Garreau is a former long-time reporter and editor at The Washington Post, and he is principal of The Garreau Group, a network of sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed.

Professor Garreau is a fellow at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., an affiliate of The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford, a Science Journalism Laureate at Purdue University, and a member of Global Business Network. He has served as a fellow at Cambridge University, the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University. Professor Garreau is the author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, and The Nine Nations of North America.